All Members Now Moving to the New Ancestry

Over a year ago, based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs, we set out to build a better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story. On December 15, we will complete the final transition worldwide to the new Ancestry site.

Since introducing the new site to the community earlier this year, we’ve received thousands of comments and suggestions that have helped us shape and evolve the site, providing critical fixes, improvements and enhancements. As of now, more than 10 million people globally are on the new Ancestry.

In 2016, we’ll continue our efforts to deliver key feature improvements that you have requested – specifically for search, hints, and mobile experiences:

We will continue to hone the quality of our search results and hints to make finding people and records on Ancestry smarter, more accurate and more relevant.

We will give you more control over how you curate, display and share your ancestors’ stories, with additional ways to customize the presentation and content in LifeStory, as well as new powerful media tools.

And finally, we will provide increased functionality and capabilities that will give you a great Ancestry experience whether you use the Ancestry site on your desktop, phone or tablet.

We realize that change is never easy, and that it takes time to adjust to a new experience. Thank you for your patience. We appreciate your support, feedback, and passion for Ancestry.

Kendall Hulet has served as our Senior Vice President of Product Management at Ancestry since March 2015. He joined the Company in 2003 has held a variety of roles in the product organization including Director of International Product Management and most recently Vice President of Product Management for AncestryDNA. During his tenure, he was deeply involved in some of the most popular innovations at Ancestry, including the “Shaky Leaf” hinting system that has delivered over five billion discoveries; the Ancestry Family Tree system that has led to the creation of over 70 million family trees containing six billion ancestors; and the creation of the award winning Ancestry mobile app, which has been downloaded more than 12 million times.

1,367 Comments

Can you please elaborate on how you will be able to close and hopefully fill the burgeoning gap of features that are being left behind in the wake of your discontinuance of FTM ? New technology and new experiences are fine, but not at the expense of why customer chose to invest in FTM and Ancestry product line.

h davies, We understand transitioning to a new site may be an unwelcome change but we encourage you to explore our helpful (and free) webinars that offer a deeper dive on the New Ancestry including tips that might improve your experience and opinion of it. Tune in to Anne Gillespie Mitchell here: https://www.ancestry.com/academy/course/updated-ancestry or Crista Cowan here: http://ancstry.me/1cYQyqV. Note the video on Ancestry Academy with Anne Gillespie Mitchell does require an Ancestry Academy login but that particular class, along with many others, is free to watch. Enjoy!

As of a few minutes ago you have one less tree with 14 500 well sourced people. At some point in August you will have one less subscriber. I will continue to use FTM and my remaining months since I have paid for them, but neither you nor the community will continue to benefit from the time and money I have spent over the years.

can I ask please who and how did you consult on these changes because nobody asked my opinion on them and I’ve been with you for some years now. was it based on a particular group , a random sample, what % of subscribers were consulted.? were they asked what features they would like to see discontinued, what features they would like in the future or were they presented with the proposed new site and then asked to comment on it? there seems to be so many negative responses across all media at the moment that it doesn’t
seem possible that the majority of subscribers were consulted on either of the two issues we are facing currently. ie the awful new site and the loss of FTM

Hi! I have been giving you money for many, many years. I found it very upsetting when your customer service people told me that my data base was too large to service. They told me that you folks wanted data bases of 500 people or less & beginner researchers. No one at any time warned me about doing to many entries on your FTM 2014. You also told me at different times that your product would not work with the more recent Windows 10 & I would have to allow you to be given admin rights to my computer when I used FTM 2014 on my Windows 10 computer. I totally dislike your new format. It brings out all the silly mistakes people make in that form when they don’t make sense in the story line, but wastes my time reading the extra words. I don’t think you surveyed your customers to see what we like. I like to see the real records like the census, marriage records, church records to get the facts…not other peoples mistakes.

“…we set out to build a better website”….too bad you didn’t achieve your goal. Change should mean some sort of improvement, but this was one of the biggest corporate mess-ups I’ve seen. Thank you for the joy your site once brought me, but I’m glad to be moving on. You’ve gotten too big for your britches, and while Ancestry ignores customers, your competitors are falling all over us – former customers, that is.

New Ancestry is still a defective product and should be recalled until ALL the problems have been resolved. I don’t know who suggested the changes that have been made, but they probably don’t do serious genealogy. So you have an award-winning Ancestry mobile app. It may be a great app, but did the app makers know anything about genealogy and the kind of work that REAL genealogy requires? I’m not about to do major work with my large tree on a smartphone or even a laptop. So far, I’ve found very little of the New Ancestry that I can call an improvement over the Old format. I wouldn’t mind having some control over what is on my family tree. You took that away when you incorporated LifeStory as a major part of the New website. There are things there that aren’t correct and there’s no easy way for me to correct them. I’d like to turn off LifeStory permanently. Frankly, it’s embarrassing for me to see and I don’t want anyone to think that I wrote any part of it. It takes a human brain to interpret all the data I’ve posted and turn it into a decent story. Historical Insights pictures that are posted to my people don’t fit the dates on the timeline. They won’t turn off. Recently, I’ve spent considerable time printing Old Ancestry profile pages for one line of my family. I don’t print with New format because the Print feature requires too much paper and ink compared to Old. The main reason for my printing is that I no longer trust Ancestry with my online trees. I want to make sure I have all my important names, dates, events, and documents when FTM no longer syncs with the online tree. I don’t want a website whose chief mission is to “reinvent” the way my family story is told. I like my original comments and descriptions better than the auto-generated ones. At least my information was correct and I gave the correct source. From what I’ve seen the past few months, “reinvent’ seems to be a euphemism for “dumbing down.” I don’t mind changes that make searching easier. I would like changes that make it easier to work with trees. I look forward to the day when Ancestry adds a user search box to find DNA matches. As a long-time Ancestry customer, I have to say that what you’re doing makes no sense. You’re killing good products and you’re alienating your loyal subscribers. You have lost my respect and I no longer refer anyone to your website or products. I never thought I would be writing this. Sad.

I am confounded by all the search results Ancestry returens that do not in any way comply with my search criteria. If you don’t have anything relevant in your databases, then just say so!! Instead, I get a ton of listings that I have to plow through to learn that few of them apply. It’s really disgusting!

I did some research after getting Mr. Hulet’s announcement email and came across an interesting review. After thinking about it, I have come to agree with the writer: “Ancestry.com is a multi-million scam designed to generate huge profits at your naive expense. You think you are creating something that you can share with your relatives and family, but you’re not. What you are doing is helping Ancestry.com to build up its own database, at your expense, and then build up its profits.” http://www.illinoisnewsnetwork.com/2015/01/06/ancestry-com-historic-faults/

So I looked at your online site today and was so disappointed. Hard to imagine why anyone would use it. Are you going for novice researchers only? Well its not worth buying. I will look elsewhere. Primera has a history of sharply increasing profits by dubious means and then dumping the business and moving on. Please sell Ancestry now and get it back in the hands of people who actually know what they are doing!

My son has an Ancestry account including the International and my siblings and I have done the DNA. Thus far it’s absolutely done nothing to help us with our search for our paternal side regarding our Murphy surname. Short of money in retirement a professional is out of the question. Thus far Ancestry and the DNA is of no help for that side and when I’ve called I’ve gotten no help. Is it because there’s an insufficient data base for Murphy’s? If so then it would seem an attempt to solicit more Murphy’s for the data base would be in order.

I remember a few years ago a survey popped up when I was on Ancestry. I recall there being generic, leading questions about whether I wanted to be better able to tell my family’s “story” and understand the historical context of their lives. I said “no” because I assumed that would mean tampering with the site which worked great for me. I imagine though that Ancestry likely received a very high percentages of “yes” responses. I doubt anyone who responded “yes” wanted or expected generic, computer generated error filled Life Stories or historical insights about grasshoppers and Sears catalogs. But that’s what we got. Now we are being told all of this was in response to “extensive research into our members’ wants and needs”. If that is true, why do I keep reading about people being offered multiple free months for extending their subscription for one month? Is that to make it look like people aren’t lining up to leave while buyers are looking at the company or do you think people will learn to live with New while using up their freebie months?

C, I hate that the Ancestry people think we are too stupid or lazy to learn new skills. I’ll admit they don’t make it easy with their poor design, but it’s not the learnin’ that’s too hard for us, we just don’t like what we are finding.

I think I recall the survey that Karen wrote about. There have been many surveys. I remember one that I started to do and then about half-way into it, I realized the questions were too general and misleading so I quit. I will never do one of Ancestry’s surveys again.

I was asked recently ‘How do you change one of the largest and most popular comprehensive genealogy websites in the world into perhaps one of smallest, least respected and most disappointing genealogy websites in the world?”
I said – “You should ask Ancestry – they know how.”

Kendall, What a crock. You cannot be serious about this fiasco. The Ancestry.com website has been rendered almost unusable by serious researchers. Could you please let your subscribers know who on your executive board is a certified genealogist? Thanks in advance for for your reply.

This new website is childish and unusable and I will be moving my tree. And Ancestry folk, you need to stop talking down to your users -its not that we are all old, set in our ways and IT illiterate as you seem to imply, its actually that your software design is not fit for purpose. Genealogy is not a game.

“Award-winning mobile app”? Who gave you that award, yourself? What a joke! Linda, I am sure none are genealogists, let alone certified! I doubt you will get an answer to that one. This has turned into a joke from anyone associated with genealogy, no matter what their level.

This redesign is clearly aimed at bringing in customers for whom genealogy is a thing done a cell phone.

Now, mobile devices are very useful, and can be used productively in genealogy (or example see FindAGrave pics of tombstones someone may take while visiting an ancestor’s gravesite).

But I find that serious research still requires a large screen – to view original documents – and a keyboard (for fast data entry.)

The removal of context-sensitive menus, the removal of items that pop-up upon hovering over an item with one’s mouse pointer – these are examples of removing functionality for the desktop in favor of making the user interface for phone users.

My only real complaint is the poor choice of fonts and colors, for my aging eyesight.

It does seem that with this design, ancestry.com is implementing a business strategy to market to younger people. Perhaps that is where the money is at, and so it’s a good business decision for them.

Quoting from the first sentence for the heading entry of this blog ” based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs, we set out to build a better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story -” .

Come again based on “what”. I have found no evidence to date anywhere from any source that there was some serious outcry for this direction for Ancestry to take. There should have been a gathering of evidence from the community at large – even half as much as the amount you are as a company getting as a negative response!

I conclude it just did not happen that way – somebody in the marketing department ( and I think we have identified that person ) thought he was going to get clever and generate a big company coup with this kind of change in direction. I shake my head as so many lesser organizations have suffered over the years at embracing clever ideas that eventually overtook their existence.

Jessica Murray: PLEASE put all of the How-To information in instead of or in addition to the web Inari and videos!!! Those formats are OK and acceptable to the younger folks, but I for one, find them difficult to follow and impossible to remember when I am on my tree actually trying to do something. With this new Web site, Ancestry has gone way overboard in making life difficult and unknowable for us older folks. Please see give us a break, skip the useless videos and put the information in print that we can print out and have beside the computer for reference when working on our trees.

I have had an account with ancestry.com for more than a decade. I have used FTM since the beginning and was thrilled when FTM finally worked out the kinks and even more so when FTM and ancestry were finally able to sync. I am dismayed at the abandonment of FTM. I can deal with change if it is for the better. This is not, nor is it just change. Abandoning FTM and sync is more of a bait and switch. Bait us into sharing our years of research then use our trees to bait newbies into joining and desecrating years of research by thinking a shakey leaf must be true. After all it is on the internet,Even if great great grandma was dead when she gave birth to three of her children. Then 5 other people copy it. Garbage in, garbage out. This is just another violation of our trust. The new Life Story format may have its merits for newbies, but give the true researcher the ability to opt out. Most of the time it is a waste of my time. Trying to decide if it is time to move on, and unless ancestry comes up with some amazing new tools in the next few months, I will be taking my business along with my research elsewhere.

I have recently tried the “new” Ancestry, nothing worked! I could do anything! One of my family trees wouldn’t even load! I hate it, worse than any update ever, at least the other times most of it worked unlike now. I also have trouble using Ancestry within my FTM, yet another problem, not solved! Ancestry is now research “unfriendly” as in a total waste of time and money! Poor service for paying customers.

You should not abandon Old Ancestry when it has fewer bugs than your New (and not so improved) version. I cannot maneuver around your trees now and there is absolutely no hint anywhere about how to navigate – your only help is if I have my tree out on Ancestry but I don’t.

I am also rather disappointed when I set up a search with “John Smith” and a birth location in the US with a birth date in 1875 and your search suggestions are no where even close. The potentially relevant clues are sometimes buried several screens deep.
Also think that if we do import a tree you should a) import their sources and b) list the name and author of the tree within the citation data. The first would allow us to see where these people are getting their information so we can trace back to see whether the information has a fatal error in it (most of the stuff out there seems to have glaring errors) and b) we could maybe go back to the tree in question especially if it was worthwhile so we could import other parts of it.

While most of the trees from amateurs have little to no sources or say that they got the exact birth or marriage date from a US Census record, if the name makes sense, I can import and do the needed research to determine if this person really does make sense.

Although I am very appreciative of the number of databases you have, the overwhelming flood of trees which are of dubious value to an experienced genealogist have made it harder for those of us who really care about what we are doing and value having correct and properly cited material.

In the past Ancestry was dedicated to the more serious genealogist who want to do our research on computers (desktops and laptops) and not on the latest handheld gadget. There is a time and a place for each type of researcher and you should be making a different app interface for each of those types of researchers. Limitations due to handheld devices can cause those users to have less access to the product but you shouldn’t wreck the experience for the rest of us. Maybe you should consider having two websites – one for the more serious researcher and one for the dabbler. While you could have access to your massive databases on both, it would weed out the garbage for those of us who want to get to the meat of the subject without having to waste our time on nonsense.

Have to agree with the Life Story comments above. Doesn’t add anything and tends to detract from serious research.

I have already deleted some of my family trees on Ancestry.com and FTM. When I am finished deleting the rest of them I will no longer be spending any more money renewing my subscription! Thanks for nothing. Greedy misdirected company!

I made an error activating my gift membership. I activated it under my second email address. After talking to Lory in support, I was told I had to give my Visa card number to transfer only 6 of the 12 months to the correct email account then call back in six months to activate the remaining six months. After confirming who I was, why can’t the account just be switched to the correct email?
Also the “app” is terrible. I can’t find a spot to access my tree from there.

Well, I converted over. The look is ugly. The family tree takes up way more space that the classic version. More clicks to do anything, more wasted time, worthless LifeStory. What a lousy product. UGLY UGLY UGLY.

Ancestry discontinued the MyFamily website and I had to scramble to find another website for my pictures and comments which I don’t like. Now Ancestry is discontinuing the Family Tree Maker Program which further complicates my research. I am very disappointed and will not renew my subscription. Ancestry has failed their customers.

I tried the Ancestry app, and I gotta say it sucks. So if that’s their idea of replacing FTM, they fail on that. As far as the site goes, it does have issues like it always crashing. Not just sometimes always. I like the look of the site, but the functionality does suck. When it’s not crashing it is slow and boggy.

Sorry for the length of my ramble, I don’t spend much time commenting publicly; but in this case, I agree with so many of the comments, and felt I should lend support.

One commenter hit the nail on the head regarding Ancestry management’s lack of understanding of one fundamental fact: Our priority is having the FUNCTIONALITY to work on our trees and not sit and admire the RESULTS of our work all day long.

While it’s always slightly annoying to adapt to changes in a system’s look and feel, I think most people get past those superficial changes fairly quickly. However, Ancestry does not seem to grasp that these latest changes have reduced functionality and clients’ ease of managing large amounts of info, and is frightening as it makes one wonder about the overall direction of the enterprise.

Another person mentioned the importance of COMPARISON in doing accurate research. Absolutely true! and it is obvious Anc. Mgmt no longer grasps this, with changes made over last couple of years, including what they consider “smart filtering”… which is anything but-, as well as removing many of the “hovering” features, which allowed for quick comparison without having to go in and out a dozen times, trying to recall what the other data was.

Ancestry stating that the FAMILY GROUP SHEET is the same as what they are now imposing (under pretense they are “working on it”) is ridiculous. As another commenter stated, Family Group sheet was essential to verifying cohesiveness and accuracy of a family section, and it was so easy to manoeuver around and to do quick edits, etc. Makes no sense to have removed this, one of the BEST WORKING VIEWS available. One would have to be completely oblivious to genealogical research to not grasp it’s functional value.

DATA (including Icons and Thumbnails) is not INFORMATION. Data must be collected, triaged, compared, evaluated to become useful information. As someone stated: to date, evaluation of relevance and accuracy is still best done by humans. [explaining why Ancestry’s hint system is not terribly helpful, however the side suggestions generated from members’ “gathering” can be]. There is a difference between filtered /computer-summarized DATA and useful information. I worked many years in business systems development and spent most of that having to deal with what I like to call “cutesy-techie-gadget” types who wanted to discuss the color of a button for hours, or automate something useless, instead of grasping the INFORMATION function of the system. ANCESTRY was actually a breath of fresh air in this regard when I began using it. Not only was their complex technology impressive, many of their features demonstrated a good grasp of the needs of their clients in regards to information and its management. Are they are now going for more of a “Who Do you think you are” mentality… over-simplifying and catering to those who want to play at genealogy for 10 minutes?

I suspect this may be driven by financial reality for the business, and the alternative would be to increase rates. There is no doubt the cost of indexing and maintaining the Ancestry collections and sites is astronomical. Being on a fixed income, at subscription time, however, I always remind myself that the yearly subscription cost is less than spending two nights in a hotel visiting just ONE library or archives. I, like others, will be questioning that value if the current trend continues. Perhaps we could suggest they branch off into creating a genealogy “game” to cater to whatever group they’re targeting, and keep a library/ research tree management vibe for those of us who wish to do serious work.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the TREE function on Ancestry is free, and it is the RECORDS we pay for. But having subscribed to other sites, Ancestry’s INTEGRATION of their record/source data with the Trees has always been miles ahead of anyone else, IMO. And it is that integration and ease of use that was bringing clients back to Ancestry for years. The individual records can often be found elsewhere. I hope this is not the beginning of the demise of what was a pretty impressive system, as they seem to going backwards, following the trend of inferior sites run by (or perhaps having been sold a shiny ball by) techno-sales-geeks rather than persons with expertise in genealogy research and its challenges.

I am so thankful I was able to get 7-8 years work done during the time Ancestry understood the broader needs of researchers, and was not just another repository of data being forcefully blended into questionable information by an algorithm. If any or all of those “improved” features were optional for those who find value in them, fine, but not acceptable when they are traded against functional features.

I fear the next Ancestry priority might be slapping more make-up on the page view and fitting everything to an IPHONE screen to cater to those whose interest in genealogy is limited to finding out if they are related to the Kardashi*ns …

“We realize (and we realise you can’t spell either) that change is never easy, and that it takes time to adjust”
Never has a truer word been said.
You have had almost a year to ditch this pile of poop, and adjust to the way your customers want the site, so why have you not done so?

As a valued customer since 2011, i shall not be renewing my yearly subscription this year which runs out in early feb 2016. I feel that customers should have choice in which platform they prefer and not be just stuck to one. The new layout seems like a smoke screen, an overcoat on the previous version with one or two little tweaks but nothing major. I would suggest if anyone isnt happy with the new ancestry, i think findmypast have a better deal goin on :), all you need to do is extract ur GEDCOM from ancestry and upload it onto findmypast.

There are 50 plus comments here and my read through did not find one that was positive. I certainly hope that someone in the corporate office will take note and take action to keep FTM and Ancestry.com from going the way of MySpace!

Right above where I’m typing it says, “We really do appreciate your feedback……”, well at the 11th hour it strikes me as funny, because appreciating and LISTENING to our feedback are two different things. You also say at the top of this page that the changes were based on ‘extensive research’, well that is just laughable. As I stated in my letter to Sullivan, ‘who exactly asked for round pictures, dark backgrounds with light text, and the silly stories’??? Your plan was to REINVENT the sight, who asked for that? I have spoken with and met many of your soon-to-be-ex-customers on FB and the blogs and via the petitions, and have never found one single person that asked for these changes. This is not an improvement, it’s a disaster! Hope you guys get a good nights rest, and bring all of your phone staff in tomorrow because I bet you will be very busy…..

REL, I cannot possibly say more than you did so eloquently. You summed all pretty much all the feelings of everyone. You are exactly right, rdp; as there are no positive comments for something that is an absolute FAILURE!

Well, I’ve deleted all of my online trees except for the one I use as a “working” tree to try to identify new ancestors and work out additional relationships. I will keep this one around until my subscription expires in May, at which time it too will be synced one last time to FTM and then deleted from Ancestry. I cannot work efficiently or effectively with New Ancestry. Since the ability to use FTM as a front end is going away, I will be also.

I posted the list of issues in August and Kristie Wells said she would give it to the development team. Not one item on my list has been addressed.

1. Below are issues concerning the new media gallery

A) We need more than two size options to view our images. Most of my newspaper obituaries do not display well since they are much taller than they are wide. Viewing the image as a percentage of the original will fix this problem.

B) We need to be able to see our transcriptions of our documents. A lot of old documents are hard to read. Why should people that view my documents struggle with reading them if I have already transcribed the documents for them?

C) There needs to be a link from the image in the new individual’s media gallery to the image in the tree’s gallery.

D) We need to be able to sort our images chronologically. This is not difficult to understand, nor should it be difficult to implement.

E) We need to be able to sort and categorize images in our tree’s media gallery, not just for an individual’s media gallery.

2. It is time to give your users more options for our tress that just “Private” or “Public.” Owners of public trees should be allowed an option to make their “Media Gallery” or their “Lifestory” views private. It would also be nice to block specific users from viewing our public trees. You know the ones, those members who attach your photos to the wrong people in their trees.

3. Give us some color scheme options. That way, everyone can choose a color scheme that is pleasing to them. One of those color schemes could be “Ancestry Classic”. This is not difficult and most genealogical websites have been offering this option for years. Why can’t the number one genealogical website do it?

4. Bring back the Web search tool. Currently “ancestry search” can be accessed at the bottom of the center (source) column of the facts view, but this is redundant, since that type search is at the top of the page. I believe the search link currently in the center column of the facts view was intended to be the “web search” for the individual and no programmer has caught the mistake yet.

5. A DNA Circle view should be another view that is added to the current views we have now. Those being Facts, Lifestory, Media Gallery and Hints. I want users who view my tree to know that their ancestors have a DNA Circle and that their descendants are actively using DNA to research our family. I believe this would encourage more ancestry members to take the DNA test. Now that we have a million ancestry DNA users, it is time to bridge the gulf between ancestry DNA members and those who have yet to take the DNA test.

I am afraid to try this “new” Ancestry! I could not figure out the last one!! “Fold3”. “All Access” membership?? You have been limiting access to more and more through the years (I have been a member since 2003)!! I could never get my FTM Transferred to FTM 2012 let alone try this new “Ancestry”

COMPLETE FAILURE! Do the people behind the “new ancestry” even use this site for research?

What was wrong with the “old” ancestry profile page? It didn’t need an overhaul. It worked well and was easy to navigate. Now it looks bloated, the fonts are too large, and the white font on the grey background was a poor color choice.

Have you head the old lipstick on a pig line? Well, this old pig didn’t need all this useless lipstick. If you were dead set on over stylizing something, do it to the lifestory pages where people are not doing serious research.

What you did with the media gallery is a crime, and removing the media thumbnails from the profile page was a bad decision. Now it takes an excessive number of clicks to view what was once available at a glance.

You’ve made if difficult to accomplish any real research — I feel like I’m slogging through mud trying to accomplish basic tasks. I used to enjoy doing my research here, but now my gut keeps telling me to run away and never come back. That’s not my first impression, it is my first, second, third, fourth, and fifth impression. I’ve tried the “new” site more times than I can count in the last few weeks, hoping to warm up to it, but I have the same reaction every time I try to switch over. I want to leave immediately. I have absolutely zero desire to explore the new version. I am a very tech savvy person with over a decade of web site experience, specifically with user-interface and functionality. I typically love updates and embrace them wholeheartedly, but this one rates a 1 out of 10 for me.

The user interface took a big step in the wrong direction. The person that selected the colors must be color blind. I won’t even take the time to detail everything wrong with the “new” ancestry because you obviously don’t want to hear our feedback or the overwhelming demand from your users to return to the “old” but highly functional version. How you can call this an improvement is bewildering. Did someone get a big year-end bonus for rolling out this ill-conceived redesign before year end?

I am one of the many users who appreciate most of the new functionality available in new Ancestry. I also was one who was surveyed in the months leading up to the redesign. I do believe many users, including me, did comment and suggest many of the changes made.

I am dismayed at the anger and resentment pouring out over a necessary change. Technology keeps changing and sites and users have to change with it. Please remember that “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” Why would anyone want to listen when people spew anger rather than constructive criticism?

I hope most of you will make an effort to learn more about what is available on the new site. You’re right~ some things don’t always load. But then, that happens when I try to load the Wall Street Journal on occasion, as well. Not everything is the fault of this change.

I am tired of the negativity spew about the new format. Learn to adjust, or drop your subscription and move on. Your spending all this time and effort and it is not going to bring the old format or FTM back. May I suggest Family Search. Maybe you will be happier there.

Wow, quite the outpouring of dissatisfaction above! I wonder what percent of Ancestry subscribers these posts represent? Because if the raw outrage above is any representation, Ancestry will be losing an awful lot of subscribers in the the next 6 months.

As for the new format, I tried it a few months back, was immediately disappointed with the UI and so switched back to Classic. Now we are all going to be forced into the new UI (or “Experience” as some companies are terming new software releases).

I have exported my tree as a GEDCOM file, so I can bail to another service if necessary. I recommend that everyone do so themselves.

Posting on this blog page is likely not going to result in any changes. Suggest people take a look at the Ancestry Leadership page here ( http://corporate.ancestry.com/about-ancestry/leadership/ ) and reach out to corporate officers through the main corporate telephone number, which as a public company, is available on SEC reports and through Yahoo Finance and other similar pages. Don’t allow yourself to be shuffled off to “Customer Service’.

Like many, I find the new Ancestry not to my liking. I will remain with Ancestry and give it a try. However, I am not sure that others to whom I have spoken here and in England will do the same. I expect that they may be losing customers which I find interesting. Why would a company do something that most people do not like and push away their customers? Are they so sure that they can attract many more new ones?
And, while I am at it, how about fixing ancestry DNA.
I can do a search in Ancestry DNA and nothing comes up but I can then find a surname in a tree. Why did the search not turn up anything? I am pretty frustrated with the lack of tools on Ancestry DNA and are others in my genealogy society.
I suggest that everyone try to copy as much of your trees as possible so that if you do pull the plug you have the data. Another thing is why can we not do a ged come of our own trees on Ancestry?

Ann Mobley people have been giving constructive criticism for months and months and months with very few results. You can read all the previous blogs and see this. It tends to make people frustrated when vague promises are made that people are listening but yet complaints made thousands of times are ignored. Now we are left with a juvenile sight specifically constructed for casual smart phone users and it is not even fully functioning but it will be our only option.

People are happy to adjust to technology changes if they improve their experience. We all can adjust to a learning curve. Why should we adjust when we are losing a workable sight?

For weeks I’ve been dutifully reporting problems I have been experiencing using New Ancestry, but it all seems to be falling on deaf ears because none of these have been fixed. This has nothing to do with me being resistant to change, it’s frustration with the forced change over to a system that has so much wrong with it.

Image Viewer – Never, ever, ever works properly. Portions stay out of focus. I cannot enlarge, reduce, or move an image to see it without a lot of lagging and unresponsiveness. I get the “Oops” error message to try the Basic Viewer. When I change settings in tools and use the Basic Viewer, it still tells me to try the Basic Viewer. THIS WORKS FINE in CLASSIC ANCESTRY. It’s also worth mentioning that the Image Viewer on Fold3 works terrifically well for me.

Auto-completion of Place Names – Works sporadically; often get no response. This WORKS FINE in CLASSIC ANCESTRY.

Relationship calculator – Works sporadically; often will not show relationship at all. THIS WORKS FINE in CLASSIC ANCESTRY.

Merging of Duplicates – Sometimes it will not recognize a name in the tree so that duplicates can be merged. THIS WORKS FINE in CLASSIC ANCESTRY.

Photo Gallery –Frequent errors loading an image in the gallery. “We’re sorry, this gallery is temporarily unavailable. You can try reloading the page in your browser, or come back later.”

Find Person in Tree Search Box – At the top of each profile page, to the left, is a drop-down field to type in the name of someone in your tree so that you can navigate to that person. It does not work for me. It does not recognize a typed name and is unresponsive. I have to go to the main list of everyone in my tree, and then find the person in that list, in order to get to that person’s profile page in my tree. The “find a person in this tree” Search Box WORKS FINE in CLASSIC ANCESTRY.

Attaching an image to multiple people – Will NOT work at all in New Ancestry. When I type a name in the field, the name will pop up below the field. But when I click on it to continue the action, nothing happens. THIS WORKS FINE in CLASSIC ANCESTRY.

Unresponsive – Many times I click on things and nothing happens. I try several times. I must reload the page several times to get things to work. I do NOT SEE THIS PROBLEM in CLASSIC ANCESTRY.

Slow – Images and documents are sometimes painfully slow to load for viewing. The circle icon spins around and around and around…..

Additionally, these are still problems that were in both CLASSIC and NEW that really should be fixed by now:

GHOST HINTS – Please fix this long-time, ongoing, very annoying problem. On my All Hints page, I am currently seeing 137 Photo Hints in the list, but there are none there. I am tired of clicking on wavy leaves in the tree view that lead to the message that there are currently NO NEW HINTS available.

INABILITY TO SEND and RECEIVE TREE INVITATIONS – Please fix this other long-time, ongoing, very annoying problem. For some of us, it has nothing to do with our email settings, notification settings, or choice of email server. It just does not work for some people.

Such ARROGANCE quote ‘We really do appreciate your feedback’ Well treating people with such contempt is a disgrace to our intelligence this is one of the finest examples of not being interested in what members have to say. I have been a member since about 1986-88, I am really saddened that Ancestry has the audacity to assume I want them to write my life story I DO NOT! My membership runs out in May 2016 I will not be renewing it. Years of work has gone into these trees, but that would appear NOT to be a factor in the discussions which have taken pace.
I don’t remember anyone asking me what I thought, even though I did lodged objections. No response back. I totally agree with the above person ‘Cathy’..
Get us back to a working properly situation!!, Are you reading these ‘Find My Past’ which are slowly going the same way!!

It’s more than negativity “spew” about the new format. I consider myself very computer literate, I understand enough about coding to write web pages or change a GUI….but, I just, for the life of me, cannot figure out how the new Ancestry person page works. I can’t add information about an image I’ve uploaded and have it save, even though the little popup said it had. Heck, I can’t even figure out how to see the information that’s been added to images by other contributors (where are those transcriptions?). I did figure out how to correct the spelling of the person’s name, but, what about alternate names? I’ve clicked everything I can find…. I’ve watched the videos, read Ancestry blogs until I’m blind, so I think I made an effort. I fixed the squished feeling entry boxes in the family column with a browser add-on so the names aren’t hyphenated and taking up two lines all the time and their profile pictures don’t look like small blots anymore….yay! (it could be my HD monitor?) ..and I really LIKE the new colors. I just wish I could find the tool I need, when I need it. I wish I could see, on the person page, what media I’ve added to them……if wishes were pennies…

To: Kendall Hulet – You claim to have brought about these changes because you did “extensive research” into your members wants and needs….and New Ancestry is what you came up with? I sure would LOVE to see that “extensive research” you are talking about! Until I do I have the right to my opinion in this beautiful country of ours. And my opinion is that you are not telling us the truth….and I am using all the self constraint that I can come up with to phrase it that way! Who made YOU the re-inventor of our family stories? Who gave you the right to encroach into people’s trees? Don’t patronize us with “change is never easy”! Those of us who have lived through wars and deaths have seen our share of change and do not need to be talked to in a patronizing tone. There is NOTHING wrong with change if something is changed to something of value! It broke my heart to cancel my membership to ACOM several weeks ago, but you will have to do much better than this for me to come back. I would also advice you to stop talking down to us, because, based on what you have created, you are not in a position to talk down to us. You have, in my opinion, not proven to have the intellect to do so.

@Carol Cheshire. I have asked Kristie Wells the same questions THREE times since August 2015. DON’T hold your breath waiting for an answer. I have not gotten one yet, which leads me to believe that that statement is untrue.

I migrated after the announcement and years on ftm to Rootsmagic. So far so good. It Imports Ftm file in seconds.
1. Uses MyHeritage and FamilySearch making me have zero dependence on Ancestry anymore. 2. It is lightning fast. 3. The company seems to listen to the customer.

You guys did not even wait till the 15th to switch over. I am in the middle of a search at approx. 11:10 pm on the 14th – not the 15th – and all of a sudden my whole screen goes wacko. Thanks a lot Ancestry, I had to start all over. The least you could have done, like a real software vendor would, is to switch at the start of the next session or login.

Let’s face it since Ancestry was taken over by Private Equity, they have not taken customers into consideration. First they dumped a number of websites, then cut back on DNA test offers, dump FTM and develop a website which is like marmite, you either love it or hate it.

It’s no longer about genealogy & research it’s about making as much money as possible, Ancestry have lost their focus and the trust of many subscribers

Hello Mr. Kendall, I have been a paying customer since 2000, before you even entered the company. You very well know that this “New Ancestry” has been tried before in ancestry.com, many, many years ago. The newer people don’t even know this. The “new” contrasting colors (which had to go back to the way they were, as it was hurting people eyes), the taking away of the main page (I was using this every single day. Now gone); even the “step” view of family tree as the first thing you see. Argh. I think the REAL TRUTH as to why things have been changed is in order. It’s the least you can do. This is sooo disappointing. I have probably one of the largest sourced trees in ancestry, and over the years I have been surveyed and gladly shared what would make things easier and more functional. Now that has all been taken away. Look at all the negative feedback above. There is a thing called customer service. You are here for us, not the other way around. Give your paying customers what they ask. I am still of the opinion that we should have the option to either use “new ancestry” or “Old Ancestry”. For a genealogist like me, it’s a no brainer. I pick “Old Ancestry”. I would like to read your reply please.

Well what can I say apart from if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. My unopened box with ftm is now worthless,i know change is never easy, but I can see this is definitely a change for the worst,be brave,admit you are wrong, change back,please.

This is just too much to handle! I welcome change and all technological advances – none are found in this new forced format. I called customer service and expressed my concern during beta testing. Fair warning was given then that you would be losing a paying customer if an option was not available to retain the old format. And I really do not understand how a company simply ignores their customer base and decides they know what’s best.
Over the months, I’ve heard several people state that the “new ” Ancestry is all a marketing ploy for younger customers. I can say that I’m under 40 and if this redesign was an attempt to lure my age group, you should find better designers and focus groups. The color schema is childish, offensive and extremely hard on the eyes.
Simply put, I’ll be cancelling my membership later today and starting the process of moving my data elsewhere. Thanks for good years Ancestry; it’s been fun!

I don’t like and it is hard to understand the info put in. Much easier with columns on side for children and adults on top. Will try, and then cancel membership. It worked fine this morning and afternoon – gone!!!

I find the ‘New Ancestry’ impossible to work with. I cannot find things with any ease and the whole thing looks amateurish in the extreme. I especially dislike the so.called family story,. If I want to write about MY family I will do so and far better than your computers are able to do. The separation of the pictorial sources from the main body of the page is also very annoying. The extra time taken in having to look back and forth plus the quite attrocious quaIity and colours make for a bad experience. Also, when trying to print a page the ‘extra’ so called information makes for extra paper and ink usage, and longer print times which equate to more wear and tear on the printer. I am not able to find an easy way to see an individuals family tree which was just one click in the old system. All in all the sooner you get back to the old system the better. Maybe you should ‘consult’ with the membership again as this is not a very good way to treat loyal customers. If you continue to foist this ‘abortion’ on us then I for one will NOT BE RENEWNING my member ship and have already started to look at other sites.

The new ancestry website is shocking. Cluttered, ugly and cumbersome. I suspect it is geared toward beginners with mobile devices, and it has forced me to use FTM to regain some degree of familiarity and control over simple tasks ….. and they’re going to get rid of FTM too apparently. Well, when both the old ancestry website is gone and FTM has gone, I’ll be gone too.

I agree with most of the comments that I have read. This is not an improvement to a system that I personally believed worked very well. When people have asked “which website would I recommend?” – I have always said Ancestry, but not any more. This is such a frustrating outcome, I have been a member for 5/6 years and have found the layouts very easy and “calming” to work on, the green colour scheme is somehow “soothing” to look at. The new page looks like “an explosion in a firework factory”. I am happy to accommodate changes, BUT… I believe the only way forward is to give the consumer the choice of “classic” Ancestry for the serious genealogist because it works well for us, and the new for the “dabbler”, and I believe you will then see which is the most popular. The serious researcher will work mainly on desktop computer, not on a small mobile device and by trying to design a website for all devices you have hindered the desktop users functionality. There are multiple hours of work put into this “SERIOUS Hobby” and it has now become considerably less enjoyable.

Good god Kendall Hulet you must be living in a cave with no links to the outside world. There is a crash coming, if I read the signs right. Legacy has already started to ramp up the marketing and advises FTM users to migrate to Legacy by running under an emulator on macs. They even give some tips on how to do it.

I agree with all comments about this horrendous change to the site, it is almost impossible to add, change, follow or understand any tree. The main purpose in making a tree is to discover your ancestry and this is nearly impossible now, also finding your connection to other trees is almost impossible.
I have added stacks of relevant information about individuals to my tree, I do not need unnecessary information and pictures that you have added to timelines.
I now find it impossible to look at a relative and trace their tree back as was previously simple to do.
As I have recently renewed my subscription I will be leaving my tree on Ancestry for now but it is very doubtful it will be there for long, I am actively looking for an alternative

The promise to improve the search capabilities of Ancestry should be the priority. At the moment it’s atrocious; FindMyPast is far more accurate, although not without its faults.
If Lifestory for Dummies is the best that Ancestry can offer in the way of improvements, it has seriously misread the market.

Really ~ you had nothing better to do but to fix what isn’t broken!!! Change is never up easy??? Well, this change – sucks! You take our money and take advantage of us. You aren’t the only kid on the block. You are getting too big for your britches and this will come back to bite you. Go ahead and moderate – you really don’t want our opinions anyway – you have your own financial agenda and that is what it is about for you ~ money not about preserving history! Totally Disgusted

My monthly subscription is up Jan 8th. I will cancel the week before after being a member since 1998. I did not mind paying for Ancestry but I do not want to pay for a site that looks like a bad baby story book from the 50’s. I have not seen a single compliment to the new Ancestry except from your employees. I am a serious researcher not someone who clicks on waving leaves. I use raw data and facts not some made up story line and that is a add on that is worthless and take up to much space. The pages is to long and needs to be stream lined. The colors are causing eye strain. You should get a eye specialist to give you information on color contrast. I downloaded all my trees and deleted all but one and it is private. You have shown you do not care to listen to your paying members. This is going to hurt you bottom line. Guess no one thought about the long term paying customers you just want to sign up new folks and hope they forget to cancel. You might not miss my little $19.95 a month but when you start missing several thousand it really will show you the mess you have made. Remember Coke Classic they brought Coke back for a reason. The upper management realized they had under estimated the consumer. We all have spoken but you refuse to listen.

I am so pleased to find that other members feel exactly the way I do over the new Ancestry layout (I found it this morning) – it’s appalling, but what makes my blood boil more, is that having committed my ancestors to the website, you have me over a barrel about continuing to pay my subscriptions. The layout is so user-unfriendly, even down to the gross colour scheme (which may or may not be that high on some peoples list) but is entirely indicative of how little thought has gone into the changes. It’s no longer crisp, and easy to read, and has become just a complete mess and jumble. You’re here to serve your paying customers, but as Srebnik has pointed out, it’ll come back to bite you I’m sure. This has shades of Facebook written all over it, and the mess they made to their Timeline changes. I very rarely bother to go on that now either. You’ve spoiled the best hobby I have and I’m fuming !!!!

Totally dislike the new site. Far too much on each page, with more scrolling to find what you are looking for. The old site was far superior. Been a subscriber for years now, but not sure if I will renew.

I think the new layout it rubbish and too cluttered, unvlike the old version. It has made me feel sad and has taken the edge off my ancestry research and thinking of jacking the whole thing in. Am in England and we English like things simple. I hope you will listen to your members and allow those who wish to to go back to the old – and better – system. PLEASE re-instate it

I too will not be renewing my membership. Even after calling and giving comments of my opinion when the Beta version came out, nothing changed. This is not only difficult to read but I’m not willing to learn all the new changes instead of doing my research. From what I’m reading I can only surmise that your profits are about to dip dramatically. Goodbye Ancestry.

This change is not an upgrade to anything ancestry! At least as much as we pay for a subscription you could have let us have a CHOICE! The new lay out is horrible…now I have to scroll forever it seems to find a photo when before they were right where I could see them at a glance. It is just ugly, and after this subscription ends, after all these years I have concerns about renewing, along with a dozen family members on here. I certainly wasn’t one you asked about changing this…for the better? REALLY???

I can only say that I am despairing about the changes you have made to what was a first class site which I have subscribed to for years. Now I am confronted by either leaving or waiting to see if commonsense prevails and you allow me to opt out of the appalling “story view”. It is puerile and not fit for purpose as a genealogical record. People die, not pass away ! I do not want intrusive pictures and factoids in my family tree which as a historian I know to be incorrect or irrelevant. I will decide what goes on my tree, not someone on another continent! Please review your decision re new Ancestry before I am forced to unsubscribe.

I PERSONALLY DONT GIVE A FECKING DAMN ALL I KNOW AS A VISUALLY CHALLENGED I N D I VI D U AL YOU AS A COMPANY HAV NOT AND DO NOT COMPLY WITH ACCESS LAWS E N D OF STORY.. GIVE US THE CUSTOMERS A CHOICE.. . http://www.out-law.com/page-330 Disabled access to websites under UK law
This guide is based on UK law

As a genealogy instructor I advise all my students to stay clear away from Ancestry subscriptions. Imagine paying almost $300 a year for the privilege of being scammed!! The comments above are a mere shadow of the scorn and disdain in which ancestry is now held throughout the real genealogy world. What a sad tribute to a once exciting source. The new gang running things are straight out of the movie Greed. Wish we could know they would get their just desserts but we’ll just have to be content knowing what comes around goes around. I agree and so do my genealogy colleagues with all the bitter frustration expressed above. We are not afraid of change, we have weathered it all but this is a travesty and our rejection comes from wisdom and experience , not naivete. No more renewals for me either.

New site is a complete mess with too much information on each persons Lifestory and Facts page. Do not need to see when each sibling was born or died within anothers timeline. Plus several family members have suddenly died somewhere else in the world because of ancestry.com programmming eg one family member died Ritchie Street Belfast now says he died Ritchie County, Virginia another died Westmoreland Street Belfast now states Westmoreland Jamica completely different countries! What is going on?????? We all take great care to ensure the information posted is CORRECT then ancestry totally muck it up. Bring back the old site or at least offer the option to use either the old or new layout.

I think someone vomited some licorice and gumi bears on my screen this morning. The new ancestry pink and black is HORRID!!!! It gives me a headache to look at it for any period of time making it impossible to focus on genealogy. Not to mention the WAITING whenever I click on something. I keep looking for the Carpathia….but it is getting cold in these waters. colder. brrr.

Return the old site please…I never wanted this ugly, slow new ancestry…just the good ancestry which worked fine before. You seem to have enraged your paying customers to make a few who use cell phones (not sure why) for research.
Still no sign of the Carpathia.

Change is never easy and I suspect many people will adapt to the new website look and feel over time. Especially those who only spend 10 minutes a day on genealogy. However no serious genealogist can live with only the new or old website. They are far inferior to the functionality in FTM. I am leaving ancestry and going to try My Heritage and their PC product. I am sure it is not as good as FTM, but I can’t research and cite my work with just the website, or the phone app.

I conclude the company has been taken over by electronic media and advertising types who are moving to a Facebook model. Just look at the top 3 managers: Match.com, Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Walt Disney online. I feel sorry for genealogists, but I feel more sorry for the staff who created a fine product and now must implement this transition to the Kardashian social media model. The traditional customer base was obviously not delivering enough advertising revenue. The Ancestry value must be the information and not the customer base. Well, I know when I am not wanted so goodbye to FTM and Ancestry. I have already canceled by Ancestry subscription which runs out in March.

BROTHER HULET YEARS AGO WE WOULD TRAVEL HUNDREDS OF MILES TO BE GIVEN ACCESS BY SOME BEGRUDING CLERIC FOR A FEW HOURS RESEARCH IN SOME DANK DARK ROOM IT TOOK ME 25 YEARS TO COMPLETE VERY LITTLE THE INTERNET IN TEN YEARS HAS OPENED HEAVENS DOORS… ANCESTRYS IMPOSED DECISIONS THAT DO NOT COMPLY WITH THE UK DISABLED ACCESS LAWS ARE CONTRARY TO LDS TEACHING – IN DISCUSSIONS WITH THE RNIB. REGARDING LEGAL REDRESS COMPLETING THE COMMANDMENT TO GATHER MY ANCESTORS IS ONE OF MY ONLY JOYS THAT I CAN DO THAT EASES THE SOUL AND PROVIDES ESCAPE FROM THE PAIN I FEEL VIOLATED AND ROBBED THAT REMOTELY YOUR COMPANY IS ADDING WORDs TO MY STORY THAT IS NOT YOUR RIGHT IT IS not WHAT I AGREED TO WHEN I CONTRACTED WITH ANCESTRY TO BE THE HOLDING SITE FOR MY UNIQUE AND ETERNAL FAMILY HISTORIES MY RESEARCH HAS BEEN ALTERED AND NOW GIVES NO JOY. I CANNOT READ IT………………………………………………………………………… I CANNOT USE IT IT IS VALUELESS TO ME … IT WORKED SO WHY HAVE YOU FIXED IT….SO IT DOES NOT I INSIST YOU AND THE CORPORATION YOU FRONT GIVE US FREE AGENCY TO CHOOSE HOW WE ADD AND WHAT WE ADD TO OUR PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUALLY COPY RIGHTED Pedigrees.

PLEASE give us an option to return to old site. I do not appreciate ancestry taking liberty at posting information/pictures to my tree that I don’t want ON MY TREE. More annoying trouble to deal with ignoring them. If we can’t have option for old site, then I have no alternative but to cancel and go elsewhere.

I have been growing more disappointed with Ancestry for years. I have been a member since the early days and have been researching for 27 years. I find that the only useful feature is the census records and even those are getting harder and harder to work with. For example. I took one of my wife’s verified ancestors, whom I have already found the 1940 US Census record of, placed his name and details in the search engine for the specific 1940 US Census and could not locate him. How is this possible?

And then I watch your commercials that imply that one can just enter a name and find fact after fact going back centuries. I have to wonder to whom are you catering to? What happened to supporting serious and critical research?

To add insult to injury, many of your data bases now only provide an index record not a copy of the actual record. Years ago one would be able to see the record not just an alleged index. How is one to determine if the index is correct?

Finally, a story is worthless in serious genealogical research. By definition a story is a contrive of someones imagination. It is not based upon fact or actual events. When I talk about my ancestors and their lives it is based upon facts and daily facets of their lives that I have been able to verify. So how in the world can you claim to tell a story of a person who you know nothing about?

The best thing that Ancestry could do is take the website down for at least a month. Scrap everything you have changed in the past ten years and start over.

For anyone really interested in genuine research go to familysearch.org there if a record is available it is the genuine article from the original source and they don’t charge you anything for it. Now that is what I call a valuable service.

I used to recommend Ancestry to classes I teach as my ‘must have’ subscription. No more! The loss of tree sync is a major backward step for those wanting a simple way to keep their main master databases up-to-date and in line with their Ancestry tree. It is the Ancestry tree that people will sacrifice, not the database on their home computers. Very soon the only trees left on Ancestry will be either out-of-date, or the junk trees created by those
who think that copying anything and everything they can find into one enormous nonsensical tree is what genealogy is all about.

The family tree side of new Ancestry has clearly not been improved/enhanced and it seems that many of the suggestions/comments made over the past twelve months have been ignored. The dark colour scheme is clearly unpopular, causing eyesight problems for some, and a major increase in ink usage for those who print from your sight.

The profile view is unnecessarily cluttered due to additional features that nobody wants. At least some can be turned off, but as for those purple lines…WHY? Comments left by others can be very informative but are now hidden away out of view. Life Story is simply ridiculous. At least you don’t have to use it.

What is clear is that many useful features have disappeared and that the enhancements are silly bits of window dressing that no serious researcher is interested in. No, I am not taking time to adjust. I have been using it on and off for some time. I know how to use it but it is no longer an enjoyable experience.

Add all this to the fact that other companies seem to be acquiring the rights to some interesting new record sets for England and… I’ve cancelled my subscription after some14 years.

Please change the site back the way it was. All the blogs above have merit. They show a community of people serious to the family tree research and documentation. These are the customers, including myself, that were loyal and would carry the brand to the next generation. Family research is not a fad. It’s a serious commitment to the study of our history. The new Ancestry has laughed at that seriousness, made it a joke. Got back to the way it was while you have a chance. Get back your loyal customers, the serious researchers before you turn this into a fad.

Your ‘new’ Ancestry is a huge fail. All this time to put on some pretty lipstick and yes there is still only one basic search where the results never comply with the search criteria. ‘Search’ can’t even get basic gender correct. Your new design fails to meet the first principles of interaction design. Where are your decision tree results on which this supposedly new and improved design is based? And then you drop FTM? What ARE you thinking?

Just another profit maximisation move by Ancestry – it has nothing to do with improving customer service. Customers are just considered to be mugs who are there to be milked. No one believes any of the current planned changes have anything to do with creating a better service or in response to customer demand. Simply Ancestry just want to make themselves more profitable.

PLEASE let us at least choose to use old or new Ancestry! I don’t want to stop being a genealogist, but the new Ancestry depresses me. Look at all the people who feel the same way! I beg you – please don’t crush my dream that started 15 years ago!

It is unfortunate that Ancestry.com has alienated so, so many of it’s customers, including me. This is no longer a site for serious genealogists and family historians. You have turned it into a dumbed down simplistic game in order to attract a demographic which wont be interested in the long term (if at all). Hit the trembling leaf! Find all your ancestors in minutes! You too can be a genealogist without all the fuss and bother! We’ve made it not only simple but simplistic!! I am very glad I decided not to put most of my tree on Ancestry.

I did the Ancestry DNA with my wife. We have hundreds of “matches”. NOBODY I have contacted can understand where we have any family in common. Just one tree (on my wife’s side) actually went back several generations to show a person in common with another tree but it is not clear if they were talking about the same person.

The old Profile gave you a look at what you (or another person) had for documentation. The new Lifeline is dumping in bits of fluff, fragments of general history and seemingly tripe from tourist brochures written by hacks. Why bother? I run a full tree for my research on my computer (with at least monthly multiple backups) and that includes transcripts of things like vital record transcripts and newspaper items plus have a database of images (mostly .pdf and .jpg) of 90% of what I have collected in documentation over the years. Much of that is NOT linked on your tree because I would have to donate it to you. I link to documents like census on your system because it helps other researchers decide the justification of people and information I have posted. I know people make mistakes and errors and just plain screw up in research and reporting. I certainly have and reevaluate what I have on a regular basis, particularly when I find someone posting different conclusions. That is what RESEARCH is all about, finding and evaluating data.
Answer me a question- how much of a cut are you getting from places like the NY Dept of Health for letting them sell copies of vital records? Just curious, must be one hell of a profit maker

Like the majority of the people commenting over the last couple of days, I would like to understand the direction Ancestry is heading. It looks like Ancestry is all about the bottom line, not your users or the research. Have you actually considered the demographic of your long time users and why we have continue to use your website?
I have been using Ancestry since 2002 and used the new interface when it was in beta. The new user interface does not meet my needs and from the comments I have read, I am not alone.
The following are a few things should be address:
1. Why do we have to loose functionality that is only offered in the desktop program? These functionalities allows us to spend less time entering data and more time researching.

2. How much higher are membership fees going to rise? Consider users on fixed incomes and that anyone’s budget can only be stretch so far.

3. Why do we need a time lines with sibling and children information on both the live story and facts pages? The facts page should be just the facts for the person being looked at. This would allow us to spend our time looking for needed information and less time scrolling up and down the page.

4. Why is the citation information “Ancestry.com” for trees that other user copying information from? The tree owner deserves acknowledgement, it was their time and money that developed the information. Tree owner information is important when sharing information with other researchers. Knowing who owns the original tree helps to reduce time spent looking at the same information over and over again as well as isolate a tree that should be watched for possible updates.

5. Why did tree hints that had already been reviewed suddenly resurface as new hints? This happened around the time the beta version came out. Were the changes tested for possible issues before being implemented? Having to look through them again to find new hints is another time consuming task.

6. Too often the DNA portion of the website slows or goes down, sometimes it is for a short time others times I have given up researching for the day. When I go service alerts at these times, it always says “all services are operational”. Using the tools Ancestry put in place to keep users informed would be extremely helpful.

7. Why doesn’t the “shared matches” on a DNA match show all the common matches? Members of my own family that I know share the match are not always listed.

8. Acknowledging that the New Ancestor Discoveries portion of the DNA summary is in beta, why do the potential new ancestors appear and disappear? If you are still testing this option, take it off line until it works.

Whether it is DNA or a tree, a good portion of your website is dependent on information users contribute, especially long time researchers that have proved their data. You are now charging for access to information that researches have share freely. This is something you need to carefully consider as you move forward.

Continue to hone the quality of search results? Thanks for my laugh for the day Mr. Hulet. I became an annual subscriber to Ancestry five years ago, the main factor for doing so was the ability to share my previous years of research with others via an on-line tree with attachment of the supporting source records from Ancestry’s databases. Good thing I wasn’t a newbie waiting for leaf hints to appear. Right off the bat I discovered how difficult it was to locate records I already knew existed in the Ancestry system due to transcription and indexing errors (I had paper copies in hand gathered the old fashioned way – printed from microfilm, copied at courthouses, etc.) Consequently I have spent many hours over these last years locating and correcting transcription errors on Ancestry records. Fortunately Familysearch came along with a much better search engine – can’t find your family on a census, go to Familysearch, up pops the record with a link to the record image in Ancestry. Can’t find a marriage record for your ancestor? Go to Familysearch, up pops the record, type the info in your Ancestry family tree, up pops the leaf hint for the record in Ancestry’s database. Then I began to discover how many records were becoming available on-line for free, including records that Ancestry does not have. So why the heck continue to pay for an Ancestry subscription? They had an easy to use and visually appealing family tree design. One click on the fact name (birth, marriage, etc.) opened up a window where you could see all the sources attached to that fact: the uploaded image of a document gathered outside of Ancestry with its transcription, stories containing information gathered from outside Ancestry, and the records attached from the Ancestry databases. That’s all been destroyed with New Ancestry. Then Ancestry tried to placate the masses with their “Exclusive” Wills and Probate Collection. I was not surprised to learn that this collection is not “exclusive”. The Maryland records – all available on-line for free. Records for many other states currently accessible at Familysearch for free. Massachusetts records are imaged from FHL microfilm – too bad Familysearch chose to allow Ancestry the exclusive on-line rights. The indexing is the worst I’ve seen so far in any Ancestry database. Transcription errors, record indexed to completely different people, many records not indexed at all. Again, never would have found the records I was looking for if I hadn’t already found them the old fashioned way. Ancestry has been systematically misleading their customers for years with the hint system, increasing the push in recent months, resulting in mass perpetuation of junk trees so that the accurate well sourced trees might never be discovered in the clutter. Then last week the announcement that Family Tree Maker, a program I have used since the days it was owned by Broderbund, is being discontinued. The one bright spot was to see the outpouring of comments from other customers who also see Ancestry for what it is – a company out to make a fast buck with no regard for their customers who have dedicated many years of their lives to the cause of researching their family history and sharing with others. I will be moving on when my annual subscription expires in March, and I know I am not alone.

I am exploring other sites as I no longer like Ancestry. It is a mess for my part. Some of my families are mixed with other families. I know mine is correct as I have family bibles, deeds, etc. to prove mine. I am so sorry to see the supposedly greatly improved site. Not for me.

Wow. I never tried the new system since I was too busy actually doing work. But of course, today I logged on and discovered how truly bad your editing has become. To correct a simple spelling error requires at least twice as many “clicks” all over the screen. And the only things I see now are “Quick Edit” and “Edit Relationships”, both of which are pale shadows of their predecessors in “Old Ancestry”.

I know that to have access to your records I have to keep on paying, but like so many above I won’t — heck, I CAN’T — keep building the actual trees inside your system. It’s just way too clumsy.

Thank you New Ancestry and FTM for totally messing up my work and altering my data. I think that is referred to as copyright infringement….on an international level. A minor tree that had only a handful of entries has blossomed into nearly 600, most of which are duplications in formats I don’t use. I have found it in other trees as well. You aren’t advertising…you are flat out lying and destructing information in the process of converting what was good into garbage. After ten years…I’ve had enough and didn’t renew but kept a couple of trees as a guest…and it infuriates me to see what has been done in my name to my information. Many of us are the sole bearers of the torch for our families history, and many have been the sole searchers for lost history of our families…and you turn it all into a lie. I am more than angry, and I know others are as well. You have not listened over the years to the long list of problems that should have been easy fixes and made your site more valuable, but you don’t mind trashing the work of those who made you possible and can’t even come up with a proper system for what you claim to be doing, but have to try to adapt an existing program. Many educational situations for the public have to be changed since your New program is obviously not doing what was promised and in fact alters data…again, copyright infringement. I am sorry you went down this road but you go without me.

“Old” Ancestry was great! The perfect template on which to build my family history, do research, etc. I was happy to pay for the privilege. “New” Ancestry is terrible! Not only does it NOT add anything to the experience, but, now, the only time spent on Ancestry.com, is to clean up the mess, the offensive content, and the bad writing on “LIFE STORY.” “Old” Ancestry was enjoyable, relaxing. “New” Ancestry is the opposite of enjoyable. Never, ever would I have originally subscribed to Ancestry.com, if I wasn’t the only author of my content. The fact that you think it’s OK to add racially disgusting pictures and drawings to my ancestors as part of “LIFE STORY” and HISTORICAL INSIGHTS is beyond what’s acceptable. The “LIFE STORY” component NEEDS to be optional, so, that someone can turn it off or delete. I have almost 2000 people and I do not have the time nor inclination to go in and edit everyone’s life story, to make it sound intelligent. Your program is anything but intelligent, and it cannot interpret facts from the facts page correctly. Why not make it a button, that someone can switch on or off, depending on the ancestor. I think you forget that trees are personal labors of love, and to have irrelevant, erroneous, unintelligent content, randomly added by your editorial staff is a real violation ! Had I not just ordered DNA for a cousin of mine, I would cancel my subscription, and I might have kept the subscription for many years to come. But, when I find pictures of slavery, race riots, starving people, emaciated share croppers, insensitive content added to my Dad when he was fighting in WWII, I think it is time to re-evaluate the direction that Amcestry.com has taken.

It’s a sad day, seeing ‘New Ancestry’ replace my family tree with what I think looks like junk. I liked the professional look of ‘old’ Ancestry. Sadly that is gone replaced by something that looks like a third grader would like, a story book. If I wanted all the junk filling my pages, I would have added it myself. The old profile page format was GREAT. A large picture framed by key details and a factual listing of key events. Now there is a junky little primary picture and a history that (undesirably) includes pictures from the gallery. Again, if I wanted the pictures in my key events, I would have put there. I dreaded to see this day come, to see my tree manipulated, without my permission, into something that I am now truly ashamed to show anyone. It is not an exaggeration to say that I HATE ‘new’ Ancestry. It is a pitiful looking product for those of use wanting professional looking trees, not childish story books.

Congratulations on a fine example of what happens when the bean counters take over an operation… quality and customer regard go right out the window. Count me as another person who will NOT be renewing their $300 annual subscription!

Where can I find the messages (ENVELOPE icon with number of message) sent to INBOX? It seems you forgetting those long-time users like me? After reading the comments, it makes me considering whether to renew the subscription.

I will say at the outset that I do not like this new Ancestry. I was not asked whether I wanted the New Ancestry or not–I was forced to take it. I have a terrible time trying to navigate in my tree. You need to take a lesson from my grandfather when he said “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Go back to the Old Ancestry because you may lose more than you gain.

Please can I rturn to the old Ancestry -this new format is hopeless. ‘Lifestory’ is ludicrous! And ‘Facts’ is a clumsy replacement for the excellent ‘Timeline’ And the new version is slow, unreliable (it crashes frequently & I’m never sure whether it has carried out an ‘add’ without double-checking), difficult to use… etc Whoever is responsible for forcing this new format on innocent members should be named nd pilloried. Together with FTM ‘retirement’ I am fed up to the back teeth with Ancestry. Please DO NOT offer us all free 6months membership as sweetener/compensation when what we want is our old Ancestry back again ;-(

You really should have got all the glitches out of this new program before forcing us to pay for this new Ancestry … I don’t want a big repetitive story for each member in my tree … I want to print the profile view without the page(s) taking up as much space as the story view … The format for the profile view stinks with the three columns … It looks really sloppy having the resources column between the facts and family members columns … I hope you are planning to have the facts column spread across the whole page once you get past the resource and other family member columns so that every few words in the fact block is not hyphenated … Also, it would be nice if the block to describe the life event had a little more space to write about the event … I really “HATE” this new format … I can’t wait to finish my family book and get off of this site … I have been a member for several years, and, I thought I would be a lifetime member, but, not with this new format … Unless a lot of changes are made … I don’t want my books to be 6 inches thick … It seems like you are forcing us to create a book that we will have to pay Ancestry for … I don’t want to do that … The thing about genealogy is that it is never ending … new facts are always being discovered … I don’t want a “closed book”. I wish you would give us the option and extend the time that we could print our pages from the old Ancestry.

After my first post, I decided I would see if I could stomach the look of the ‘New Ancestry’. I did look. I can’t stomach it. It is just plain ridiculous what we have been given for profile pages. It might have helped had the stupid thing defaulted to the Facts page, but ‘noooo’ , it has to default to the childish Story format. And then I have to click to display siblings??? What a sad joke Ancestry has played on us all. The ‘go live’ product looks like something that might have been used as alpha site, to be refined, to be made professional. But noooo, it’s the ‘final’ version. ‘New Ancestry’ should carry an age requirement going forward. “Not for anyone over the age of 8”

YOU HAVE RUINED ANCESTRY! It’s NOT “a better website”! You took a viable, working model and changed it to a clunky, useless site that looks and feels like an APP. That may appeal to a few newbies playing at creating family trees but not genealogists like myself who have spent decades researching our past! Change should equate with improvement, but this is an enormous biggest corporate mistake! Your site was once a joy and now you are ignoring viable complaints and denigrating your own customers by suggesting it’s only because we do “no like change”. How dare you! I hope your competitors take advantage of your ignorance and give us what we’re looking for and the second they do I’m out of here! When my subscription runs out, that’s it for me.

You have completely ruined what was the BEST, most comprehensible, “timeline” in the industry. I have been unable to find any “desktop” expression which comes close to the clarity of the timeline of Old Ancestry — I’ve tried six including FTM of course which is similar but not as good — AND YOU EFFYOUSEEKAYED it UP!

How STUPID of you to take your finest, most elegant feature and clutter it with meaningless garbage such as “During the summer of 1911, [redacted] MIGHT [emphasis added] have been living in Leominster, Massachusetts when a deadly heatwave killed more than 2,000 in the northeastern United States.”

For one, I don’t give a rodent’s hindquarters about a heatwave in 1911, and if your stupid text robot had looked at the Residence Facts preceding and following this bit of meaningless fluff, it could have noted the presence of Leominster, MA in both 1910 AND 1920 and omitted the “MIGHT”.

This change is tantamount to fraud.
The changes removed value from a purchased product.
The format is clunky and slow.
The format is downright painful to view.
Navigating is a mess.
Finding information that was once at fingertips is almost impossible.
Selling FTM 2014 and then discontinuing it should open up the company to a lawsuit.
As soon as I can figure out how to salvage my new information, since I can’t sync to FTM and if I could, it would corrupt what I have, I am leaving Ancestry. Too bad…it was a great product. You killed it.

The new ancestry is ridiculous and not properly programmed for the life story. It’s v N American biased My grandfather in Dublin 1922 is suddenly in Campeche Mexico!!!! His children born in Ballinlough Co Roscommon are now born in Colarado. How can that happen

I really doubt that you (Ancestry) appreciates our feedback. The delivered product says otherwise. We objected as to having a substandard product shoved down our throats. Did you listen? No. The reply we got was that you (Ancestry) would do as you want, save money, and provide campy product going forward. ‘Thanks’ for nothing……

Are you reading all these posts, Ancestry? Have you ever read any of these comments over the past several months. The majority of your paying subscribers absolutely declared that the new format is not what they wanted. Up to today we at least had a choice to use the Old format, now you’ve managed to take that choice. Personally, I have several Trees and so much information, how can I possibly afford the ink it would take on this new format to print my Trees and leave. All the time you used ignoring what we said, you would be better to spend time improving the dysfunctional problems that exist…snag?…”Oh snap we’ve hit a snag, check back later!” Do you really think that’s cute and funny. Maybe the first time it’s cheeky, but those of us who spend hours a day on research, your site problems are frustrating.The glitches are a daily occurrence Ancestry, why haven’t you put your ITT grads on that improvement, where we really need the fix, cause it’s broke people!

I am getting used to this although find it throws up a lot of irelevant search results and sometimes I find abetter source on Familysearch.org. The worse thing is printing. is impossible to tell the tree to print a wide long row on to landscape paper.

I have no Idea what you were thinking when you made this change!!! It SUCKS!!! Why did you not ask the users what they liked and did not like. From what I read you have many very unhappy users, and I’m one of them. I liked the way it was and please change it back ASAP!!!! You may very well lose this paying customer!!!!

I would like the Old Ancestry back; at least giving subscribers the option of using the Old version rather than New version … it’s what I paid for. Change for the sake of change is not always good … you’ve managed to “New Coke” your brand, and how did that work out for Coca-Cola? You have changed your brand, alienating long-time users like me so why are you taking the risk of losing me as a customer? I just can’t stand this awful new format and after nearly 20 years of building my tree I am absolutely disgusted with Ancestry ruining it, making it unusable for me. If we are no longer given the option of using the Old or New Ancestry, my check will no longer be in the mail.

How can you NOT listen to these comments from people who have been using this site for years? Are you totally deaf and wearing blinders so you cannot see the damage the new program has done to your product? Other genealogy programs should start some serious advertising at this time.

I believe your main objective anymore is the pursuit of money. Not offering a service to those of us passionately tracing our family histories. You have changed the format to something quite unusable, and taken away the most valuable tool (Family Tree Maker). I truly don’t think many of the higher ups in your company do genealogical research at all or these changes would be recognized as stupid. I have pulled my trees from your site (5000+ individuals) so you won’t be selling that information. I’ll stick around until my subscription runs out in June 2016, just in case you bump your heads and wake up…..

I concur with all the comments above at how the “New Ancestry” is NOT an improvement. I have cancelled my subscription but I have not received a refund so I will contact the Better Business Bureau and have them address the issue. I don’t know whose brainchild this is, but, in my opinion, if you were to take a photo of them, and place it side by side with a photo of a horse’s posterior end, you’d be hard pressed to tell who was who. Does the words, “New Coke” mean anything to you? This New Ancestry is a monumental failure. My subscription was for the Old Ancestry, you remember, the one that worked… the one people liked so well they renewed their subscription, instead of cancelling it.

I’ve just been forced onto the new layout and the ability to revert to the old (more user friendly screen) has now gone. I will not be renewing my 10+ year membership in April but will go elsewhere for my research. Thanks for nothing.

Very childlike and inaccurate. Can’t imagine real genealogist working on such a program. I just cancelled today and will wait to see if this lasts. All my information and hard work for years is on here. I am very disappointed.

I am so disappointed.
After researching for over 40 years, it is truly sad that I’m expected to relish the ridiculous switch to your new format. Shame on you…..and shame on me for renewing Dec 7th 2015.
Thank goodness for RootsMagic and the voice of sanity for genealogists.

So, you set out to build a better website? Good intentions, sure. But by taking away my option of working with the old version, you’ve managed to destroyed something that has worked … something that made Ancestry successful in the first place. Sorry, Ancestry, you have failed badly. Very badly. I will not be renewing my subscription.

In case you have not been keeping track, as of 11:09 am est 12/15 this is your blog history for the past week or so.
12/6 – The New Ancestry: December 6th Feature Update – 162 comments, all of but several negative
12/8 – The New Ancestry: December 6th Feature Update – 8482 comments, all of but several negative
12/9 – More Information on Family Tree Maker Desktop Software – 923 comments, all of but several negative
12/11 – The New Ancestry: December 11th Feature Update – 108 comments, all of but several negative
12/14 – All Members Now Moving to the New Ancestry – 161 comments, all of but several negative
What part of pissing off your customers do you not understand?
This does not count the negative comments on your Facebook page. I would enumerate them too, but navigating Facebook pages is almost as baffling as navigating your website.

I have a suggestion rather than a complaint. I use about 15-20 “badges” repeatedly throughout my tree to denote grandparents, military service (Revolution, Civil, WWI, etc), military branches, DNA cousin and a few other designations. There isn’t an easy/quick way to use the original image over & over so I just upload over and over (as do many other people who also use state & country flags, etc). It would be nice to have a personal photo gallery available for this specific purpose–maybe add the feature to the photo upload tool? The great thing for me would be that I could immediately see, for example, how many confederate & union soldiers or Original Patriots or Grandmothers/fathers are linked to the specific image. I also think it has the potential to save a huge amount of space on your servers because I’m not the only person who does this. (Right now when I want to use a badge, I have to find an ancestor who has it on their profile, then open the gallery, then click on the image, then follow the “add” link. This just takes too much time and effort when I’m working quickly with my large tree.) I can imagine this feature as a line in the upload tool that says “Have an image you use repeatedly? Upload and save it here” Then when we want to use it again, give the option to “Select from your personal gallery.” You could even limit the size of the personal gallery to, say, 5 MB or 15–20 images so it doesn’t get out of hand. If someone wants more space they can delete images, reduce the file size of an image or pay a small annual use fee for more storage like $5 or $10.

You can’t be serious!!! You say in your letter at the top of this thread: ” … Thank you for your patience. We appreciate your support, feedback, and passion for Ancestry.” Seriously? This is just another example of corporate mumble jumble. If you understood our passion for family history, our passion for spending thousands of hours over dozens of years building our family trees, you’d be more sensitive to your subscribers. I would like a return of the classic version; keep the new version for those who like it; but don’t ignore those of us who don’t. You asked my patience. I have no patience for learning this new format. You asked for my support. You had it; now you don’t. I do not support your decision to eliminate the classic version I have been using and paying for all these years. You asked for my feedback. Quite frankly, I am disgusted with you and your cavalier attitude that suggests I am getting something better. I am not. Add me to the list of subscribers demanding a return to the option of using the classic format.

Please give us some proof that you are even reading these comments. I posted several negative responses every time I would change back and forth from the old site to the new to let you know that the old site was the better fit for my research. If you want to add the story view to the few interested customers you should have done it as a separate screen log in. Also the old site was clean looking, with the information I need clearly in view. This new ancestry is too cluttered and much harder to view. This plus the abandonment of your FTM customers will make my decision to abandon Ancestry when my subscription runs out all that much easier.

I have read through many of the comments above, and in particular note that many deal with the subject of change. Change for the sake of change is not good. Change to better something is fine. New Ancestry was just for the sake of change. someone wanted to make a name for themselves in the ancestry corporate climate. It does boggle my mind when ancestry makes comments that they listened to their customer base and came up with this new product. Clearly that didn’t happen, and this marketing spin on things makes the assumption that we all had a hand in this change when we didn’t. If they truly cared about customer opinion they never would have made the bone-head move of terminating FTM, eliminating the option to change or add data to the military page of an ancestor, etc. I could go on and on but that would just be reiterating everything already said. I don’t want a serious genealogy website to work on my cell or tablet. That functionality isn’t necessary as how can I look closely at documents? People would think better of Ancestry if they admitted they made a mistake and bring back FTM.

This website is now absolute rubbish, and unless the old website and FTM are put back into place for those of us who want them I shall be ending my subscription. In the meantime I shall be taking down my various trees from your website, I dont see why you should profit from all my hard work over the last 15 years

After just sending a message to Ancestry requesting that I be returned to the old website, I now realize that my request will be in vain. What is more annoying is the fact that I have recently renewed my membership. If we are going to have no choice in the matter, Ancestry can certainly rest assured that there will be no further subscription coming from me !! The new site is PURE GARBAGE . An absolute waste of everyone`s time. After the amount of money I have spent with Ancestry, quite frankly I am totally disgusted with the heavy handed attitude. Someone actually needs to get back to the drawing board & pronto !!!!

I hate the new Ancestry and I have been an International member for a decade. Neither searches or reports are as good as in the past. I have over 20 trees and also use FTM. Now what. I will be cancelling my subscription when it comes due for renewal.

You know, it doesn’t seem very long ago that Ancestry arguably had the best offering in the world of genealogy. Now look what a mess it has become! Extraordinary incompetence. Can’t think of a single reason to renew

“Jessica Murray: h davies, We understand transitioning to a new site may be an unwelcome change but we encourage you to explore our helpful (and free) webinars that offer a deeper dive on the New Ancestry including tips that might improve your experience and opinion of it.”
First of all, not everyone wants to learn through webinars. The information should be available for people who want to read, not listen and watch. Second of all, if “getting used to” a new look was just a cosmetic thing, but functionality was even better, I doubt there would be so many complaints. The problem is big corporations think they need to dumb down their sites cosmetically, because apparently they are the only smart ones, and their customer base are just a bunch of dummies. I also believe that the redesign, dumbing down has more to do with what is easier and more cost-effective for ancestry, than it to “bring a new and improved product to our customers to provide even better service”, the typical spin companies put on these changes. I have already cancelled my month to month subscription. I will continue using FTM until I get a different software up to speed. After that, I will use other resources to do my research and avoid ancestry.com as much as I possibly can.

As a computer programmer, I can tell you that most programmers give you what they want not what the user wants. why? Because they don’t want to take the time to learn how the user does things. They rather write the way that is easiest to them. This is one reason I am no longer a programmer. I for one would see how they do things and ask what doesn’t work and fix it the ask what they wish they had and see what I could do. The most rewarding work I did was making those wishes come true. Ancestry you need a programming staff that understand genealogy and work closely with your power users. These are people who are working with large trees and have sources that come from places other than your website. I understand about wanting to grow your customer base with newbies but experienced genealogy users can do their research with or without you. You rather have them on your side or the first thing they will tell newbies is to stay away from Ancestry because they don’t like serious researcher. They just want the people who think all hints are for their ancestor and all tree are true. Yes Virginia your grandmother did give birth to those children after she died. Yikes!

Look forward to future press releases lamenting the number of marketing executives terminated as the direct result of lost revenue and membership renewals/subscriptions!!! THIS HAS TO BE THE MOST IDIOTIC CORPORATE MOVE IN THE HISTORY OF ANCESTRY.COM.

What’s it gonna take, Ancestry? Are you listening? Do you care? Are you hostile to complaints? Are you going to dig in and double-down on this new format? Do you think you know what’s better for your subscribers than your subscriber know what is better for themselves? After reading through the comments, I’m sensing a pattern: Fine, keep the new format (our subscription dollars paid for it), but give all of us the option of working with the classic format: that is what we’ve been doing for the past few months anyway. If not, please subtract $19.95 a month from your bottom line because if the bottom line is all you are interested in; I do not want to be associated with you.

“based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs ……..” It has NOTHING to do with your customer’s wants and needs. Otherwise, you would listen to them and abandon “New” and “Imroved” ancestry, just like “New” Coke and you would apologize. You would also cease your destruction of Family Treemaker. Again, it has nothing to do with what we want.

Your once loyal customer base will never forget what Ancestry did to them in December 2015 with forcing us to accept New Ancestry and announcing the upcoming demise of Family Tree Maker. It is truly hard to regain a reputation for trustworthiness and integrity once it is lost. Your competitors are clapping their hands in glee with the uptick in interest being shown in their websites and product offerings.
No, I’m not an old fuddy-duddy afraid to try new things. I have been using New Ancestry off and on since you rolled it out as an option in June, and have submitted quite a bit of feedback about missing features and loss of functionality, bugs and glitches, and the terrible mess that Life Story is. As an example, I recently added a marriage record for ABC. I then looked at the Life Story profile for ABC and find in the narrative that “ABC and DFG married and had 10 children. ABC then married DFG.” So then I go back to the Facts page to see what happened, and for once those purple squiggly lines turned out to be useful. Your computer generated Life Story narrative inferred from a 1900 census that ABC and DFG were married. When I added the actual marriage record your computer generated Life Story narrative inferred there were two marriages. Yes, I can edit the narrative, but what I really want is a button to completely turn off Life Story!
My trees are now private, but will be deleted when my current subscription expires…I won’t be renewing a subscription. I also did my last sync with Family Tree Maker this past week, and have disabled the sync function because I don’t trust Ancestry any more and fear that my files will be corrupted if I continued to sync.
I’ve backed up FTM on a hard drive, printed out all the most important records, have purchased a competitor’s software and downloaded another free one, and am actively exploring alternatives to Ancestry.
Ancestry, you have permanently lost my trust.

“Over a year ago, based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs. . .” What members? the employees of Ancestry? I have not seen members jumping for joy here. I wasn’t asked my opinion and I have been a member since 2001. so exactly which members got to vote and where are their voices in the forum? Try our webinars give it a chance. What part of “WE DON”T LIKE THE NEW ANCESTRY” Do YOU not understand? Obama all over again. If you don’t like the way the House votes, just VETO!

Why not put your “””new features “”” as a tab option.
Your new layout takes you out of the realm for a serious genealogist. Never would the layout be used for a professional presentation. The time, money I have spent dictates a polished presentation with facets to the story, not a children’s presentation. Taking my trees, and my DNA elsewhere.

Hate it! Hate it!Hate it!Hate it!…have been telling you that for months every time the site would flip me to the new and I would change it back to classic, obviously no one cares. Why can’t you compromise and allow those who like the new way to keep it and allow those of us who appreciate the classic to use it. That was working well. Compromise is always the best way to resolve a conflict and you would be able to keep all your customers instead of losing a goodly portion of them.

This site is a nightmare! Editing information that is currently in your tree that twice as long and then the site locks almost every time. For the money I pay each month. I don’t think this site is worth it anymore. #Extremely disappointed.

When you first showed us this site, I CHOSE to return to the original set-up. This new set-up is ugly , ice cold, and totally uninviting to work in to begin with. I don’t like having to scroll through two miles of life story, sources are in the middle of the page. WHY? How stupid. You have reduced family connections to a minuscule size to be irrelevant. Now I have to click on another button to see my pictures and click each picture individually to see it, a major waste of time. The one thing I requested OVER & OVER & OVER AGAIN was to be able to arrange pictures in a chronological order. I guess that’s not happening. You have also taken away my ability to tell my family story by putting in what you think should be there. My mother lived in Sacramento almost all her life, why in the world should you include this fact during the Cuban missile crisis, it has nothing what so ever to do with her life, she was not involved in it. By the way I don’t tweet, twitter facebook , buy app’s or any of the other useless nonsense. I don’t want my ancestry page to look like I do. You have managed to destroy what was the best site available on line, thanks for nothing. My 3rd & 2nd great grandfathers passed down to us their favorite saying “We are born a blank slate, stupid must be learned” we in our family shall not learn stupid. Those at ancestry have not only learned stupid, you have graduated “Summa cum laude” from the University of Stupid. You all need to be taken out to the proverbial barn and whipped with a good old fashioned hickory switch. Nothing I have seen here is an improvement and as with so many others I will be leaving.

I cannot believe you would abandon the old tree layout. As a subscriber for approaching ten years, I will not be renewing my subscription. There goes over 10,000 records down the drain. You have lost my trust in doing what is correct.

Please Please Please STOP messing about with Ancestry, as a paying subscriber for nearly 10 years I WILL NOT Be renewing my subscription this time. The “new” format is soooooooooooo slow, soooooooooooo time consuming, takes sooooooooooooo many mouse clicks to view what was visible on one page before and is totally unusable to serious genealogists. The life story facility is useless, it shows things that never happened in my family’s lifetimes, it presumes to tell ME things about my family that are totally unfactual and above all, it assumes that I do not know about my own family. PLEASE give us the option to use the old format. I unsubscribed from findmypast for many of the same reasons and have not returned, it seems that you want to be ANOTHER one that I unsubscribe from.

Excuse me – instead of selling their product as usual, shouldn’t FTM be upfront on their web site (instead of looking as if it’s “business as usual” and have a notice clearly stated that this is the last year FTM will be made and no longer work with Ancestry.com? This testimonial on the opening page is more than misleading, “Customer Testimonials
I have used Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker for several years, and they have made my life and my children’s lives much richer. Together they provide the very best way to discover our roots and who we are.
– Mary Hoverson”.

Especially bad for people who are new to genealogy who buy or receive FTM during the holiday season…..spend hrs and hrs entering family information, then get the oops sorry, we understand change is difficult, we’re not making FTM any more after this year, but you’re really gonna love having your tree on Ancestry and viewing it with your phone………

Dumbed down and messy – my observation as a history teacher is that it resembles a child’s project. Instead of aiming at the lowest common denominator, Ancestry should have maintained a clear, unfussy format that users could have used just as it was or added to as they wished. I probably won’t be re-subscribing to Ancestry

Michael Lafreniere I checked out the site you posted. I love this section of the article.

“I feel like that guy in the Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man” where the Aliens land on Earth promising to bring Earthlings to their futuristic world, leaving behind a book that is titled “To Serve Man” and only discover, too late, that the meaning of the title is literal and has to do with the Alien’s dinner diet.

“It’s a cookbook,” the woman researcher yells to her scientist boss who is blocked by the Alien from climbing down from the spaceship ramp to freedom. “It’s a cookbook.”

I don’t really like seeing when all the siblings were born and died, cluttering up the page in family trees in the new version. Also, what are we supposed to do without FTM? Is the plan to have everyone’s trees on the Ancestry site instead of on their own computers? This is a problem for those of us whose internet connection is spotty. I like being able to look up things in FTM even when I am not online…

I see that commenting is open until Dec. 28. Seriously? Who died an made you king? I think these negative comments will would be coming for some time after that, so I can certainly understand why you wouldn’t want to deal them anymore. Out of site, out of mind. As for your new format: You are certainly out of your minds.

Can I just say that the new website looks great – on my mobile phone. On a proper computer it looks bloody awful, but then all this change is all to do with making things more user-friendly on mobile devices and sod anyone who has a laptop or desktop PC. Most genealogists use their mobile phones for serious research – don’t they?? Thank you for listening.

Come on, Ancestry. Get real. You just added (no, I should say, you just junked up) to my site – without my permission – something called a life story tab. Are you trying to be helpful or just stupid. Is this a site where Ancestry can just add templated crap to MY research. And the junk you add is unbelievable: a full screen “fact” that my father “may have seen” Jesse Owens win Olympic Gold at the 1936 games. Really? He would have been 5 years old. Not a lot of televisions on the farm in 1936. Not a lot of 5 year olds could just take off playtime and fly to Berlin for the Olympics. What a bunch of useless information that you now force me to wade through … and pay for. Don’t like it. Didn’t ask for it. Don’t want it. Add me to the list of subscribers requesting the option of returning to the old version. If not … bye. It’s been a wonderful 10-year relationship, which (in your definition of enhancing the family research experience) is no longer enjoyable. It’s become a task instead of a passion. It’s become cumbersome and ugly instead of simple and elegant. I’m canceling.

How many times do you have to be told? You ruined the site. I will be downloading my information and then leaving your site.
You have been sold the Emperor’s new clothes. We have been your customers for 7 to 10 years. It’s been so long I have forgotten. You can’t allow us to have the format we chose? Okay, we’ll take our money and leave.

Dear ACOM Executives, as I sit here on hold on your cancellation line, I’m just thinking how easy this mess would be to fix, keep your new ‘platform’ and add the option for us to return to the screens we know and love! You would not be the first company to allow a “Classic” view as an option including: TurboTax, MapQuest, Windows, Yahoo and many many more! If and when you do so, let me know and I’ll be back…..

Jane.. I am looking at RootsMagic and giving their free trial a run to see how it looks and works. So far its looks far exceed what was recently done here.. I may purchase it if it turns out and guess what? its a lot cheaper too.

If you refuse, yes refuse, to dispose of the junk known as LifeStory, then at least implement a teeny-weeny bit of coding that leaves Family Events and Historical ‘Insights’ OFF by default so that we don’t have to go through every damn ancestor to remove your rubbish.

May I suggest two Ancestry user interfaces: one for serious researchers, who now have to “dig” to find information on ancestors in one of the many useful databases–which exist if you know about them; and the second for those lovers of fantasy and science fiction, who just want to attach someone or something to a tree and move on. On some trees I’ve seen folks born in the 1400s, whose children by magic lived in the 1700s. My GED remains on RootsWeb, with all of its information–notes, sources, etc., intact. Much of it is at your fingertips–just Google.

Cannot comment on any ‘extra features’ as I cannot get past opening tree pages. I find it difficult to focus on the pages with the new dark background, it makes me feel ill. If you are not prepared to offer ‘opt in/opt out’ then a long serving customer is probably opting off.

Jeanne May you are so right about the fantasy trees, I found my grandmother who died at home with my mother and me here in London UK, being buried in Los Angeles, another ancestor born in UK, being born on the same day and year in New York

PLEASE READ THIS! About an hour ago I posted the email address for all of you to further complain to customer support. I also posted the email for more options to voice our concerns over this monumental mess. Ancestry sent me a note that ‘the monitor’ had to review my post before it would go on this blog! So I guess the said monitor who represents Ancestry doesn’t want anyone to complain to anyone but each other. So call the 800 number and ask the nice people who work the phones, for the customer support email. Please do not take your frustrations out these nice folks on the phones. They are not responsible for the new format.

Going, going, almost gone. This new site is terrible; not available, try again later, missing photographs, HINTS: my information that I have added. Hard to look at. Hate it. Going when my subscription is up. Ancestry doesn’t care, except for the bottom line. Transcription is careless. And, yes, there are “lovers of fantasy”, too many. As soon as I see someone that has a tree harking back to royalty and movie stars, of which there seem to be many trees like this now, I back out. What crap.

It is just so so darn slow now. Not being able to access the NBN yet, the speed of the old Ancestry was quite acceptable and I could work with the difficulties using the viewers, that I occasionally encountered. Now the images take forever to open, if they ever do. No one else in my home can use the internet if I wish Ancestry to work.

It is now so cluttered, cumbersome and bulky. Where before one click could bring up an item, now several are needed and added to the snail like speed – grrrrr

I found I had several people with hints, but found all those hints had been reviewed for those people. Had to delete the people and re-enter them to correct the error. When trying to add their spouse or child etc., Ancestry would not allow me to choose a person already in my tree. Now I had to type the name exactly how it was spelt in the original document. As there are no consistant spellings in the 1600s, this is a major problem. Bring back the list so you can choose the right person.

Apparently I am supposed to be able to customize my home page. There is a large chunk that I would prefer to remove, but I can’t even get it to the bottom. Then to top it off, it won’t save my settings, just reverts back to the default.

Before, if there was hint in another tree, it was easy to click on the person and view their tree to quickly see if there is a match. It won’t work now.

I only used the tree to help find new records and suggestions. There will need to be a lot more relevant databases added to keep my subscription.

Once again, “new and improved” means find another product, because they just wrecked the old one.

I have been with Ancestry for many years and have not been happy about any of the changes they have made. I am so happy to see that others feel the same way I do about this new Ancestry. I have not had the time to read through all the comments but I believe that Ancestry merged with FamilySearch and they are trying to look more like the FamilySearch website. That being said it is so frustrating that I can find free information on FamilySearch but if I look for the same information on Ancestry I have to pay to get a higher level of Ancestry for the same information. Also, do you all know that the Mormon’s get Ancestry for free. Our costs go up so that we can pay for their membership!

Please give or sell FTM back to Broderbund or Banner Blue so that we can continue to use what we have grown accustomed to for a long time (in my case for almost twenty years).
Kendall, don’t be a Grinch.

After reading through many of the above comments, I regret to say that I agree with many of them. I do not like the “new” site at all – it seems to have been dummied down for less experienced researches to feel like they are making great discoveries. I have not found any new information on my family research on your site for some time now, while over on FamilySearch I have found many new discoveries. I have n=been an Ancestry member for over 10 years, and have always loved it, until now. This new site gimmick, along with the disgraceful discontinuance of FTM, has saddened and disappointed me beyond belief. I will not be renewing my membership next year when it expires, and I never thought I would hear myself say that. I get the distinct impression that no-one here – including me – was ever asked for an opinion about the changes involved, and for you to continue to say you are responding to members’ input about the new site is an out and out lie. Shame on you for thrusting these changes on us under that guise of it being what we wanted.

I’m pretty sure a family member is getting me a subscription for Christmas, which I’d been asking for for months. I’m so upset right now, because now I DON’T WANT IT anymore and it’s going to be difficult when I open that present…

I think I should weigh in now. I, too, am upset that FTM will be retired. But it will continue to work on my laptop until I choose to delete it, which may be never. Before Ancestry allowed us to sync our trees with FTM, we should have stored all source images and pictures locally in some folder structure on our HD. At least I always have. That way, I had each image even if FTM died. So, what does the retirement mean to me? Nothing really. I’ll occasionally get a subscription and use it to download the source documents and update my local tree. I’m sure Ancestry will allow me to manage my online trees, so I’ll occasionally upload a new version of my trees so the public can take advantage of my research. I’m probably one of the ones Ancestry is trying to force into a subscription, but I never trusted the internet very much and I’m prepared. I’ll throw in my two cents about the new format when I rejoin Ancestry to take advantage of their sources. In the coming year, think about re-claiming your data from Ancestry and using it for what it is, the largest genealogical REFERENCE library in the world.

On a more positive note, I do like the shaking leaf facility, I know it brings up lots of incorrect options, but it still is quicker overall.
Ancestry is missing a real opportunity though, if it retained both versions of the way it looked, it could market one as “Classic” for the long suffering family historians, and a “student” or “Novice” version to attract the less experienced market.
Ancestry is risking gaining a new and possibly large market, but one which will be a lot less loyal, at the expense of it core and long term loyal followers.
Final on the subject of FTM, why not re-instate the support for the foreseeable future, and only consider cancelling that support when you can demonstrate to us that we are such a small minority that it makes business sense (you haven’t told us how many and what percent currently use FTM and the web site).

I have taken a break from research as my professional life is busy. You have tried to induce me to renew but from what I have seen recently on the site and taking into account the comments here just not worth the money !

For an opposing view. I am OK with the new format. Yeah, the colors are bad. But I only use the Facts tab and i like being able to jump into a source from that page and jump back. Yes, you need to put the “Continue Searching link back in, but I understand you are working on it. Just for the record, I am 68, been using FTM since the DOS days and have had an Ancestry account for years. I am NOT giving up access to the databases because I don’t like a few things. Clearly I am an outlier. 🙂

Mr. Hulet, Don’t thank me for patience. I know patience all too well with 5 children, 5 siblings and after researching family history for 35 years. No thank you, I have all the patience in the world. Appreciate support and feedback…..I don’t believe so. I have responded to numerous feedback questionnaires and according to all of the feedback on the blogs, etc. it is of no avail. All the feedback in the world is pointless when it falls on deaf ears, as is the case with Ancestry staff. Passion for Ancestry, no I have now lost my passion for Ancestry, resulting from your improvements. I have PASSION for genealogy and always will have, it just won’t include Ancestry…don’t confuse the two.
Change…. I don’t need Ancestry’s lecture on change either. At my age I continue to encourage change, as I have experienced, enjoyed and benefited from change in every aspect imaginable. I will always incite change when the reward is long term benefits and improvements that have value. I like faster, better, improved, enhanced STUFF…..none of which your New Ancestry is providing. New Ancestry has just changed to a different face with no improvements of usefulness and a slower functionality with no value added stuff for me and a multitude of paying customers.

Too bad you didn’t ASK us what we wanted/needed… This new, “improved” version was certainly not due to user request. Quite the opposite, it appears. We certainly never said, in overwhelming numbers, “Change everything!” But, you did anyway. I’m not sure whose needs you are serving, but it’s not us, your subscribers.

P.S. The ability to print reports, which was quite dismal on the “old ancestry,” is even worse on the “new ancestry.”

The “New” ancestry is absolutely AWFUL.
I have been using ancestry for over a year and the old layout was just fine! There was never a reason that came to my mind thinking that ” oh this would be a better system if we just put bright colors and different layouts”…. I used to love using ancestry and now I find myself dreading using it because it have completely changed….I’m very unsatisfied in the new change….. There should be an option to change it back to the old layout for those who prefer basic simple systems.

I have been using the “new” ancestry for months now and don’t find it an issue at all. It costs me a fortune to have a worldwide subscription from this end of the planet, but I believe Ancestry have a more comprehensive collection than other sites. I subscribe to many others on a pay as you go basis (which is how I started out on Ancestry) to search records not available on Ancestry or to compare transcriptions for those hard to find pesky people.

I haven’t uploaded my full tree from FTM, so I don’t really envisage any problems once they no longer support it. Also with all the issues that people seem to have syncing their data, I think I made the right decision there.

My only gripe since getting my DNA results is the number of people who have been tested but either do not create a simple online tree or link a current one to their results is very frustrating. Perhaps more could be done to encourage them to participate in this way – creating a tree as part of the process to order a test, or to retrieve the results. However, we have been able to discover cousins all over the world who we had never had a hope of discovering beforehand.

I feel like my house is on fire, and all my family photos, mementos, diaries, cherished books, handed down through the family, are all going to be lost…. not just to me, but lost to future generations. We are all calling out for help, but no one cares at ancestry… so we are helpless to save or even salvage decades of data for those who come after us. It is a truly crushing blow…

…also there is no “demise” of FTM. Just an announcement that Ancestry are no longer going to support it. You can still use it, you may not be able to sync anymore (‘though from all accounts that might be a blessing)

You just wont have any support for it from Ancestry, just the same as if you are still living under a rock using Windows XP you no longer have any support from Microsoft should you encounter a problem.

I am finding I cannot work effectively in the new site with any sense of enjoyment or feeling of achievement. So many issues – and that’s apart from the graphical boxiness.

From a purely Health and Safety perspective however (Trees):
* Too many clicks – e.g click to select a person, move to (e.g.) hint, click – (compared to the old) which was hover click
* Add person – select person, click, tools, click, add person, click (rather than – hover click)
* Moving the mouse from the middle to the top right too often to edit a person or aspect (and then click)
* moving the mouse continually to the top or bottom of the page – especially for those with visual access issues and the need to have larger screen resolutions.
* viewing records – click, then see then click again, then click to

When viewing hints, you cannot see what records you already have for that person
You cannot see the records a person has without clicking in
…so many more causing me to get so upset and lose the enjoyment out of tis site and past-time.
I have recommended so many people to Ancestry.com over the years to progress their research, now I feel I can no longer do that with any sense of responsibility

December has been a bad month for any serious genealogist who was using Ancestry.com or Family Tree Maker. It was very disappointing to watch Ancestry.com commit two major blunders in so short a period of time.

Blunder #1: new Ancestry site. I cannot understand how anyone could say with a straight face that the new Ancestry site is an improvement. It has been seriously dumbed down. The Lifestory feature is worthless. It also cannot get the correct place names. Example: One of my ancestors was born in Saint-François, Île d’Orleans, Nouvelle-France (Colony of New France) in 1677. I use place names that were in use at the time of the event but in FTM I enter the GPS coordinates for the location. His Lifestory in the new Ancestry gives his place of birth as “St Francois County, Missouri.” There is nothing about the new site that is an improvement over the previous version. Worthless.

Blunder #2: Discontinuing Family Tree Maker. What a slap in the face to genealogists! I rely heavily on this software which now contains almost 10,000 names. It appears that Ancestry’s goal was to drive its one-time-purchase FTM customers to an Ancestry.com monthly subscription. I currently use both and would not have a major problem with this if the new Ancestry site was at least as good as FTM. But Blunder #1 does not leave this as a viable alternative. Over the next several months I’m going to look for new software to replace FTM and will soon cancel my Ancestry subscription. You had the chance to be the premier genealogy software choice but you blew it. It will be very interesting to look at your future quarterly financials to see the effects of these two blunders.

I have another vent to do. The ‘old’ Ancestry profile provided for a nicely sized primary photo. The profile page had a sense of dignity to it, a memorial. The dignity is gone in New Ancestry. A dinky little picture in a big space (who at Ancestry wants to take credit for that poor design). Today is Day 1 of New Ancestry being ‘THE’ Ancestry. I hate it. Ancestry is promoting itself as “…the gift that made everyone’s list this year”. It’s on a lot of people’s list, that for sure, but the list is of things to get rid of in the New Year. The only way I would give to someone would to someone I dislike, as a gag gift……

I liked the Old ancestry. The New ancestry stinks. I hope you ancestry people rescue it quick. Do you know that most young people are not interested in their ancestry?? It is only until people get middle age or older that they have time or want to do this!! Please get new ancestry fixed or go back to the OLD ancestry. What are you people at ancestry thinking of?

***I REPEAT-BOYCOTT ANCESTRY: EVERYONE THAT HATES THE NEW PROGRAM-CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS IMMEDIATELY-WHEN WE CAN USE THE OLD FORMAT-WE WILL RENEW OUR SUBSCRIPTION-my tree has over 16,000 family members listed-they are ALL A MESS DUE TO THIS CONVERSION-I WILL CANCEL MY ACCOUNT TODAY!

If you want to really get upset…..
Go check your order history under your account. I have spent over $3,700.00. And this list does not even show the years before 2000 . I have 240 trees listed from helping others get started. I am deleting all, so they will not show in their statistics…. not that this will bother them….I am posting this on Eastman and other blogs so everyone can check how much they have spent.

I thought from the beginning that they discontinued FTM so they could charge a higher price for a “New” FT Maker with the corrections that were needed. Now I do not know what they were thinking,,,,Why are they forcing the “New” Ancestry on us….someone else said they could offer “classic” like other sites do. ….

Because, what ever they were thinking, seems to have blown up in their faces. They are not the only losers….we ALL are… What a Shame

I switched over early to the new Ancestry. The experience has been great for me. I have found a lot of new information that I never would have found. I have also started adding a lot of information to my ancestors in the system. I think the change was a great move.

For every one person that has posted here about the changes, there are at least 10 people quietly researching alternatives so they can get the heck out. For those saying RootsWeb – keep in mind they are Ancestry too, so it’s only a matter of time before they get all screwed up too.

You know what bothers me the most – is the spin and hype about how this version of Ancestry is the best one ever. It is not. No false words will convince me otherwise when the site is so bad and works so poorly. When you lie to me I remember and I will not trust your words ever again. To the people who are threatening to drop their subscriptions, DO IT! or they will not get the message. I dropped my subscription based on several of their bad decisions. Also make all your trees private so Ancestry no longer gets the benefit of your long and hard work to lure a new batch of suckers into paying for this tripe!

First, let me comment on what I love – THANK YOU for changing the layout to permit me to organize results by name instead of by the number of results!

However, why don’t you focus on making the information correct? Your software engineers could better spend their time making sure that the Family Trees uploaded do not contain impossible facts.(i.e., I just looked a tree that said “When Absalom was born, his father William was 6, and his mother Mary was 9” – REALLY! ), Ancestry has apparently removed the ability to comment on these ridiculous entries. You are perpetuating misinformation and bad genealogy. Having spent thousands of dollars on your website since the 1990s, I am appalled.

Also, it is still impossible to narrow Family Tree results by the number of sources used(which, incidentally, would probably be useless anyway because Ancestry permits the use of “Ancestry Family Tree” as a source; by that reasoning, the example above, where the father is 6 years old, is a source).

However, there ARE trees which are properly sourced. It would be nice to be able to say “Show me only trees with #___ sources or more” or “Show me only trees with sources besides Ancestry Family Tree”. Unfortunately, I now cannot connect a specific source with a specific fact, because all sources for one individual are listed in a group.

I am sure I will discover other things that I like as I use the site, but you really need to do something about the trees that perpetuate impossibilities.

I see many people agree with me! The upgrade is horrible and I would like to know who was asked to use this in a trial before the computer idiots put this out. I was not asked to participate and never am. The ONLY good thing about the new Ancestry is to see the Will information posted. I have been paying a lot of money over the years and now am stuck with this crap. You need to put it back the way it was. It’s a waste of my money and it may be the end of my paying hobby to Ancestry. There are other free sites to use that has the same information. IDEA: Do like Mapquest.com….offer the new and a choice to the ‘old’ format! I’m sure with all the paying subscribers that Ancestry has there is money to cover computer space in your system. People at Ancestry must have been drinking when they came up with this CRAPPY format!

First and foremost: I HATE what you have done to the site. That said, I will patiently try to work with it. One thing that MUST be fixed, however, is the ability to see document transcripts from an ancestor’s profile page. I have uploaded images of hundreds of documents and the transcriptions I added to them are very important, particularly for the many that are in foreign languages and would be worthless to many people who can’t read them. The transcriptions are visible from the gallery of all the images I have uploaded, but other researchers don’t find them this way. They find them because I have attached them to particular individuals and the transcriptions are not visible from there. Please fix this quickly.

I am really dismayed that ancestry will no longer support FTM. I have used it for many years, and love the fact that I can synchronise my FTM tree with my online one. This allows me to work on my tree anywhere, and share it with my family. If I can’t synchronise my trees there is no point in having an ancestry account.

We are not impressed and in fact depressed by your new mandatory website changes. Yes, it appears possible to struggle through them and maybe still accomplish some research, but the presentation is no longer summarized if desired and it is overly wordy. In particular the new profile page is overly wordy and the presentation is not nearly as helpful as it was before. Also, the photos of relatives are smaller and the presentation overall is a major step away from the high quality we previously really enjoyed. Why downgrade a good thing to something that now does need improvement????? Maybe programmer job security??????
Don Anderson (member since 2006)

I had already written to ask about staying on the old style. If I can’t, I will seriously consider if I wish to stay on Ancestry. Surely as we pay our fees to be on Ancestry, shoulkdn’t we be given a choice of which one we want to be on.

I will put up with a lot for genealogy, so I’ll figure out how to use the new features, tolerate the new format, etc. etc. What bugs me the most about the new Ancestry is that it seems to be built on the Las Vegas model — push a button, stuff lights up, the undiscriminating user gets high on his or her apparent success, and then the mistake multiplies a million times as other new users push buttons and repeat it. At least 95% of the trees on Ancestry are pure junk. You should be working to make trees more accurate, rather than just working to increase the volume of subscribers and false information. I understand your business model, and good for you, you’re going to make a fortune. I just wish you didn’t have to ruin what used to be a wonderful hobby as you do it.

The new look is awful, bright & glaring, everything too large & too spread out (& I am elderly with poor eyesight), cluttered with unnecessary junk, why do we need historical timelines when most of us seem to have a better historical knowledge than Ancestry. If we can’t go back to classic then can we please be allowed to choose colour schemes, font sizes etc and remove the garbage. When you consult people about proposed changes do you ever consult anyone outside the USA? And when are you ever going to prioritise search results correctly, after years you still bury results that actually match search criteria amongst a load of irrelevant garbage.

I have not renewed my subscription and have deleted the trees I had on your site. The changes are not what genealogists want and your prices are getting way too high. There doesn’t seem to be any loyalty or incentives such as we get from FMP who have given wonderful discounts to loyal customers.

I’m not one who has a problem with change. In many cases change means improvement or simplification. Keeping things simple and avoiding monotony is what made Ancestry great. Now when I go to a profile page I find I’m spending too much time scrolling through the page and seeing repetitive info that shouldn’t be there. It isn’t helpful at all. I have loved working on my trees but now I don’t . I have decided to let my subscription run out. I’m sure I can find another web site to replace Ancestsry.

Your “better website” has reinvented things so well that today I am confronted with a website that is becoming useless. Seriously, someone needs to be fired. Either that or fire yourselves and sell the website to someone who will do it right and not be so dazzled by the new and useless. Serious family history aficionados are not doing their research on mobile devices with tiny screens. Get over yourselves – you got it wrong, now make it right again.

May I point out something flawed in your explanation of the changes. You mention that 10 million people are now on the “new ancestry”. Did they choose that? No. And a few days earlier you wrote a blog about “12 million have downloaded the mobile app”. So? You are forgetting something. The reason I and many like me downloaded the mobile app (for my Ipad mini and Iphone) was to be able to see the family tree when not at home, but I would never ever use either of them to research and work the tree. The computer is for that. The point I am making is that without your basic foundation: ‘Old Ancestry’, you have NO foundation. None. I am taking off the mobile app from my Ipad and my Iphone right now. It’s pointless.

I now figured out why last month Ancestry offered me a bargain price for a world subscription. They took my money and now have me locked in until May of next year with a web site I don’t like using. Brilliant business move Ancestry!

I’m appalled that Classic has gone without any warning. I assumed that the Classic option would be available for years to come. Please rethink this and bring back Classic otherwise I shall migrate away from Ancestry for good.

There is only one word to describe this: HORRIBLE.
It is slower than molasses in January.
Do your programmers actually USE the site (not just play around with it to see the bells & whistles they created)? If they are like most programmers I know, they were more concerned with LOOKS than FUNCTIONALITY.

I switched over to the new format long ago, and unless I am totally missing the boat here, I am not seeing all the problems everyone is complaining about. I am disappointed that the ability to sync with FTM is going away, but I think I can deal with that. For those complaining about trees being posted that have mistakes or searches that provide wrong results, I can only say “garbage in, garbage out!” I wish everyone luck with their own decisions. For me, I’m staying and I’m happy!

When I search in The “new improved” Ancestry, using information found ON ANCESTRY and I try to find a known individual with a known event on a known date, Ancestry returns “nothing found” type messages. Come on Ancestry “1/10 could do MUCH better” as it might have said in my school report.

What irony! 15 Dec 2015 should go down in the annals as the day that countless millions of historical mis-statements were generated by a company dedicated to history.
The hypocrisy of the new system beggars belief: on the Facts view we acquire a dominating resources column and purple lines shouting at us to increase our accuracy; at the same time we acquire Lifestories riddled with misinformation on a scale impossible to correct.

I don’t like the new site either. and I’m not happy that you are discontinuing FTM. I don’t use the “story” selection at all–too much non-information in it. Also, I like to have MY database backed up to my own computer. Also, there are times when I want to check something in FTM and don’t have internet access. I have noticed some things are Ancestry are better–more relevant hints and new sources of information. But the Ancestry site can be VERY SLOW and frequently I get the Can’t access the website; try again later message when I’m trying to review a document. Overall, I don’t feel that Ancestry is better, just more frustrating.

The complaints aren’t just here either. Do a search on “ancestry.com reviews” – you’re being torn to shreds EVERYWHERE. I think it says a lot when so many take the time to write at multiple places about their disapproval…

I was forced onto your new format this morning, and believe it is absolutely terrible. You have obviously done this to appeal to tablet and smart phone users.
You should still give long time users the option to use the old format, which was more user friendly and professional. The new format is colorful, but a pain in the neck to the long time user.

The “New” Ancestry is a mistake that will be echoing throughout 2016. Unfortunately, the current corporate decision-makers obviously don’t give a rat’s behind about actual genealogy research or individual family tree creators. THESE are the people who truly built Ancestry. There have been so many, many corporations that were successfully developed locally or regionally and sold out to umbrella corporations. In my experience, the first thing these mega corporations do is set the accountants to cannibalizing existing functions and services to achieve cost savings. This way their bottom line reflects a greater percentage of profit without increasing revenues. The problem is, in about 4-5 years sales have inevitably degrade to the point that management (new management, because the people who originally instituted the changes are long gone) now try to repair the damage by spending lots of $$ in focus groups and seminars to determine why revenues have drastically dropped off. The solution is, of course, to revitalize the product or service – and to implement customer service procedures that actually provide real help in solving customer issues. The “arm’s length” corporate philosophy that has become the norm in so many businesses over the past 30-40 years is like a cancer that keeps metastasizing. I’m always hopeful these vendors will stop selling us the “Emperor’s New Clothes” and resolve the problems at their core, but that may be a vain hope. As soon as I can find a workable family tree desktop software and a good, reliable, responsive online genealogy website, I’ll be making that change. I waited a long time to post any extensive comments – not only to check out what the final version would look like, but also to take in what long-time experienced users were saying. And I bet for every person who has posted there are probably hundreds who will not comment publicly – they’ll just sadly and quietly leave. A year from now Ancestry will be organizing focus groups and seminars and spending more $$ on TV advertising hoping to bring sale back up. In the mean time they will try to make money on those new users who pop on and pop off within a few months and who don’t really want to spend much time actually researching. That might work for a bit, but any business person can tell you those impulse customers aren’t the ones you want for long-term, steady and profitable revenue. Shame on you, Ancestry, for perverting such a wonderful product and service.

The biggest plus with Ancestry was access to information and opportunity for collaboration. Based on last couple weeks of comments, it appears that clients with years of research are deleting trees and/or making those private. Most of my DNA matches either have private or no trees. Ancestry has significantly diminished in value to me because the people being driven away are the ones who had the most years of experience to share. New Ancestry is a degraded version of Classic (tasks take more clicks, appears buggy still) but I might have stuck with you for that goldmine of information. If you lose those experienced clients, I question why I would stick around. At the rate you are losing their trust, I don’t have much hope.

I am very disappointed in the NEW AND IMPROVED ancestry. White background on a duller white background with pastel colors makes reading any text very difficult. I honestly hate this new version. I don’t need anyone to write my story. My ancestors have done that for me. Most definitely will be looking for a different company in the near future.

I have been using the new Version when the option became available. I have read the reviews for over an hour and only found one positive one from Ann Mobley. I have to agree with everything she said.

I work for the government and when I started 20+ years ago I had one monitor, no online resources or online law books to obtain answers to assist the customers with their notices.I had to research through ‘paper books’. Every year for the past 20 years, there has been a new program added to the one stand alone when I first started. Was for good reason but it didn’t seem so at the time. I dislike changes & with every new introduction of a new system to learn I stressed, complained, whined & cried. Since this is how I ‘financially’ supported my family I couldn’t just throw in the towel but had to go with the flow. I’m almost at retiring age now and there has been 32 programs added to that one stand alone that I started with. I don’t have 1 monitor but 3 now. This story is not about my life even though it sounds that way. My point is I truly dislike changes and complained every time I had to deal with it which has made the change over with Ancestry a lot more tolerable.

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve had to adjust to all the changes in the past when doing my job or not. But I find the New Ancestry very user friendly. I know the majority of you are most likely using windows 10 and possibly google chrome or IE. I started Ancestry on my old computer (XP) with 2 monitors, using Firefox. I continue to use the same computer. I do daily updates and keep my computer clean. It runs faster than my laptop (windows 10). I’ve read many comments or should I say complaints that the new Ancestry’s features don’t work, or can’t find what they are looking for that was there with the old Ancestry. I have “NOT” had any of these issues. There are a few things that I would like to see changed, but I also know that as with any introduction to a new program you don’t discover the changes needed or wanted until you roll it out into live production. I suggested a couple changes and less than a month later, it was fixed.

I know everyone dislikes the LifeStory, but you don’t have to utilize it, if it’s not something of interest. I personally like it. I actually use some of the verbiage populated by Ancestry when telling the persons story. I do modify and remove the excessive ‘commas’ (I know the reason for them) but when telling “MY” story, I want to do it my way. Instead of saying John Doe, was married twice. I like to modify the story. Example: John Doe was born on February 1, 1880 in Phoenix, Arizona. The son of James Doe age 29 and Lucille Rogers age 27. He married twice in his lifetime. He married his first wife, Jane Williams on June 1, 1900 in Las Vegas, Nevada. They had four children during their marriage. Jane died on April 4, 1918 in Riverside County, California the same day their fourth child was born. In 1920, James and his children relocated back to his hometown in Phoenix, Arizona. He married his second wife Rebecca Smith on March 1, 1924 in Phoenix, Arizona and remained there until his death on December 3, 1964 at the age of 84. John was buried in his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Funeral services were held on December 7, 1964 at the First Baptist Church and he was laid to rest that same day in the Monument Cemetery. John was survived by his second wife Rebecca, his four children Nancy, Jean, Robert and Douglas. He was blessed with 18 grandchildren and 32 great grandchildren. Of course if you can’t find an obituary you won’t have nearly all this info unless you have a eulogy passed down to you or knew the person ‘personally’.
First of all my EXAMPLE: of the Lifestory is totally fictional. Names, places, dates, etc and don’t hold me accountable for the dates & math. It’s just an example with fictional info.
Under the Lifestory tab you will also see the different events with broken lines around each one. YOU are the only person who can see the broken lines. You have the choice to accept and keep the event or just delete it. I chose to add the headstones to the Lifestory page at the end. You can do this very easily by going to the FACTS tab and under Burial click edit and then on the left select media and select the headstone. It will populate and be visible on the Lifestory page. Your GALLERY photo’s will also appear on the Lifestory ‘if’ they have a date on them.
I did a lifestory for my 26 year old LIVING niece who has experienced things in her 26 years I yearn to do. I did her lifestory by starting when she was born (hospital picture), 2nd photo she was in dance school at the age of 3 and on stage doing her little skit in a sailor suit. Next was her 1st day of High School, then a few Prom’s. She was also Varsity Cheerleader so I had a photo with her & the squad. She graduated HS and told her parents all she wanted for a graduation gift was she to go skydiving & scuba diving. SO she did both. Next photo is her in mid air smiling, arms held out with the trainer strapped on her back and the next one is undersea hovering about multi-colors of beautiful sea coral and small fish. She entered Americorp & traveled the USA for 1yr cleaning up after Katrina Hurricane (photo added of her receiving an award from Americorp). She got the ‘itch’ for travel so she decided to be a flight attendant but this was ‘after’ she worked with handicap children for 2 years. A picture of her with the handicap children in a classroom setting. Last is her earning her wings & standing at the side of the plane with her wings attached to her lapel on Grad day with American Airlines. A very interesting life for such a young lady. Here is my point. All these photos were dated and came down the timeline on Lifestory.. I told a story with each photo. How nice will it be if Ancestry is still around 100 years from now and my nieces grandchildren or great Grandchildren can view this.
I often wonder how remarkable it would of been if all the photo’s on my tree hadn’t stopped in the early 1900’s. A few 1800’s but a very few. So folks…the features you have always used are working, you can tell a story about your loved one or the relative you have never met your own way. I haven’t been able to find a way to get a photo to go down my Lifestory page without putting a date on it. This is something I’m going to have to report to Ancestry. So far my reports or possibly a multitude of people reporting the same thing I’m sure, either way the issue was fixed. So give Ancestry some time to work all the kinks out of it and give yourself a couple of months to get used to the new features and how these ancestors now have a personality to match their name.
I know I probably made a few enemies, but I’ve never been one to agree with everyone when that’s not how I feel or to sugar coat things…Every new software that hits live production ‘HAS’ to be used to discover the issues. We the people “HAVE” to report the issues. Complaining is not going to help or threats of withdrawing from Ancestry. How about just send a report of non working issues or suggestions of better performance and then give them a while to think it out and then make it work. My question to the majority of the folks not liking the New Ancestry is….Do you only care about getting the correct info and moving to the next person? Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Two day’s later after completing someone on your tree a person ask ‘what cousin are you working on now’ and you’ve already forgot their name or their sibling or parents name or better than that you forgot how they are related to you. Sure you can look it up & give the correct info. But if you give this new ancestry a try and utilize the features, you won’t have to refer back to your computer when asked about a specific person. You won’t remember their date of birth or place but you will remember how they are related to you. I want to know these people on my tree and I am determined to obtain correct info or no info. All my info has a source “even a nickname.”
I have such a deep interest in the new Ancestry because it has literally introduced me to these people. I spend anywhere from 2 hours to 1 week on one person. I spent 5 months on a great uncle, his wife and thirteen children. This was on an average of 8hrs a day during those 5 months (I was off work). I review others trees AFTER I complete the person I’m working on to compare the information I’ve obtained. The majority of the tree’s look so void. I worked the old ancestry and it was just that. OLD and outdated. I got bored and worked a few hours a week. I find myself on the new Ancestry from the time I get off work Friday afternoon until 11pm Sunday night. NON STOP. I enjoy meeting my ancestors, even though our visitation will have to be limited to a photo or graveyard.
I hope I get the chance to work with the many of you on here commenting. Kick back, give Ancestry a chance to ‘perfect’ everything. I’m sure this was a difficult decision “but” the decision was made to move forward. So we have to adjust to the changes or give up on our research and getting to know our families.
Just an FYI: I didn’t here any comments about being able to crop the profile photo!!!!!!!!!! Great added feature. If you’re having issues with the new ancestry, I always have to relate the old to something already in existence to understand how it works. I compared the New Ancestry to Facebook.

Unfortunately my subscription does not expire until August. I primarily used FTM because of syncing . I don’t mind the new look, but I do mind paying that much money when the only thing I use is the databases and I have to wade through so much junk, inaccurate searches and bad transcriptions to only find a poorly transcribed index. I can do better elsewhere.

“Over a year ago, based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs ” Well, you didn’t as me, and as far as I can see, the changes are not liked by lots of people. Ancestry screwed up by stopping support for FTM. Now you guys have screwed up again. Isn’t it about time you actually listened to your users?

I don’t like anything about the new ancestry. Have been a member for years. Give us a choice of old or new. The old is much much better than the new and doesn’t have that depressing dark look. I cannot even add photos/shields to my people. When I click on a story all I get is a gray screen. I will not stay with ancestry.

It’s clear that ancestry.com is abandoning its serious FTM genealogists in favour of those who want to simply logon to an inferior web site and wildly copy information from other people’s trees, irrespective of whether any “facts” have been validated or not. Ancestry.com has opted to reap the benefits of the inexperienced masses rather than those who want to take their genealogy seriously.

@Claire – Re our DNA matches: Although some of our matches indicate “No family tree” or it is locked, in many cases there are trees in their account that can be accessed. I have not figured out if these trees are actually tied to their dna. With these 2 categories, do not click on View Match. Instead click on the name to the left side which is next to the profile picture and that will bring up their tree/s.

I find it interesting that the people defending the horrible changes are the same people who have given positive reviews on other websites over the past 3 weeks (perhaps in anticipation of the uproar?). Ancestry employees?

As of today I now am being forced to use the new Ancestry. I have been a member of Ancestry for 20 years. Thru all of your changes and upgrades I have had no problem and welcomed the added updates. This however is a classic failure!! You have taken an excellent product and have totally ruined it. It is only half a program compared to the software FTM and even the old Ancestry view that was available up to yesterday. I did make an attempt in June when I was switched without my knowledge to the new beta Ancestry. It stunk then and it still stinks now which is why I used the old format until you threw everyone into the new one today. You got loads of my money over the 20 years, but over the years I felt I got my money’s worth. Not with this new format though. I will be thinking very seriously when my subscription rolls around about parting company.

Because you are ditching FTM, I have privatized my tree and do not plan to renew my subscription this next year. Once my subscription expires, I’ll be deleting my tree. The only reason why I even subscribed was the convenience of FTM integrating with Ancestry. Congrats on losing an FTM customer since 1994.

The enormous list of irrelevant hints is becoming a tiresome chore. Please when a person is born and lives their entire life in Australia, why then do I receive hints for baptisms of persons with the same name living in England or the USA???

I wouldn’t mind Life Story so much if it were 100% reflective of my research and what is actually in my tree, and NOT misleading or incorrect at times. The trouble is, you can’t know unless you review everyone in your tree (an impossiblity for those of us with huge trees).

The colors bother me a great deal visually, but I did stay on the site long enough today to spot three (out of less than 20 people reviewed) with seriously wrong LIFE STORY information inserted by Ancestry. I know some have to do with my prior wording in data blanks but, again, I can’t go back and find those now.

Example #1: A woman was married twice and never had children. Long ago, I had written No Children in the child’s space with each spouse and marked the gender as unknown. This has been fine until now. In LIFE STORY, the unknown entry was recognized as a child and it was written in the first LIFE STORY paragraph that she had one child with each husband.

Example #2: A woman lived in Texas until her husband died in 1951, after which she went elsewhere to live with relatives. Where she went and died is unknown to the generations of step-family remaining in Texas. I wrote the details of this as shared by a relative in the fact block and had put Unknown Location in the burial location block. I have not yet changed her LIFE STORY paragraph which reflects at this moment that the she is buried in “Location, Northern Cape, South Africa”.

Example #3: I have written about the glitch resulting in multiple creations of the same child, causing them to be reflected as a child with two sets of parents. This was from, I am told, the Index Relationships after multiple step-family members are downloaded from the same census or Find-a-Grave record. The father who actually had two children with wife #1 and two children with wife #2 was written up correctly with both – with a sentence in between that he had two more children from a “relationship”.

These are things I cannot overlook and will have to keep my tree private and unsearchable until Ancestry – and I hope they do – clears things up.

I plan to alert the developers through the proper link and hope they can find a way to circumvent some of these issues.

Otherwise, my own parents were presented quite well in LIFE STORY. Photos that I had originally placed on the tree and had been careful to date and name a location when uploading, LIFE STORY picked up on the timeline and put them in the proper place, which added a very special touch to the page.

I am afraid that I reluctantly have to agree with many of the other readers. I answered some questions a while back and said I did not like the new format. That has not changed. Some of the features that I really liked and used are missing. While I probably can learn to get around in the new site I don’t see why I should have to. I also will not be renewing my subscription. There are other sites I have used in the past and I will go back to one of them.

Folks, I have NEVER seen anything like your this (not supporting FTM and the “new and improved” Ancestry platform) –not sure who your focus groups were, but I am utterly disgusted. This new Ancestry looks like it was built by a 5 yr old. The background wreaks havoc with the eyes, the extra clicks required to retrieve information are a menace and nothing about this is intuitive. The failure to support FTM is simply ill founded (except, perhaps, financially for the shareholders) I can more than assure you that this summer, when I am up for renewal, I’ll take my trees and move to another venue. For the amt of money we pay, and have paid for years, it seems time to end our relationship. This format is atrocious

This is a big FAIL. A valuable resource in which an awful lot of us have invested decades of valuable time and money into has been ruined with the joke of a system which has been put in place. This is NOT about people being reluctant to experience change it is about Ancestry riding roughshod over customers and enforcing upon us a product we never signed up for. I am another one who will be leaving. How many will it take before you wake up?

Add my name to the list of long-time users of Ancestry.com that is not happy with New Ancestry. The color scheme is harsh on the eyes, the layout is not intuitive nor helpful, search layout and functions are not equal or better than the previous setup, and I’m sure I’ll find much more to be unhappy with as I try to use Ancestry.com moving forward. I would like to see the complete list of Ancestry customers who recommended ANY of the many changes made to the site – I doubt the list would be very lengthy. I can only hope that Ancestry will continue to revert back to functionality and site design that is being asked for by the many, many, many commenters on your blogposts. Shame on Ancestry for not listening to their customers – we’re all complaining about legitimate concerns. LISTEN! Then act wisely.

Ive just cancelled… There must be legal implications..Thousands upon thousands of manhours dedicated to a quest which I might add we have paid for. Too many errors to ever be able to edit them… My trees are now null and void… Legal advice? What do the paying public think?

Another unhappy customer of many years. With over 13,000 names I’m finding it a lot slower to download, harder to negotiate, but most disappointing of all, is that the auto find in addresses is not working when I add residential addresses from Census, yet works on some other sections. Don’t need all Resources find in the middle of page. I want to see Family Connections. Sources should be back on right hand side of Fact, so you can quickly see which ones are not sourced. Sourced underneath Fact only adds to length of page. Cannot edit person from main name, i.e. To edit e.g. Date. Search Ancestry needs to be in one place, not continually disappearing down off screen as more resources are added. Only thing I like so far is the removal of those horrible purple source connection arrows.

Ancestry has tried several times in the past year to change me to the NEW. Several times I have refused. Come March I will no longer be with them unless they give me the option between old and new. I WILL STAY WITH THE OLD OR ELSE.

I don’t care to have the story line created for me. The site is way too busy!!! I will probably end up cancelling my subscription, unless there is an option to go back to the old… The family tree view is HORRIBLE, too many colors making it too busy…. You have to realize that some people this change has no effect, but if you are older, black & white is way easier on the eyes…

The new website is horrible and just like some of the other commenters who did you consult because no one asked me either and I have been a customer for a very long time. If you want us to like the web site I suggest you emulate FTM and rethink your decision to retire FTM, UGH so upset and if I don’t get the results I want by the time my subscription runs out I won’t be renewing either.

I agree with the complaints that have been generally forthcoming from your members. I think a lot more consultation should have taken place before replacing a programme, that most people were happy with, with a grandiose disaster.

This sucks outloud! I see I am one of many that are very much dissatisfied with this new ancestry. You repeatedly changed me to this cumbersome piece of crap and I continued to go back to the user friendly “OLD” ancestry! When questioned I repeatedly told you it was not user friendly. I believe all these changes will lead to increasing costs and as of today it already cost more than it is worth. I have been a member of Ancestry many years, I will not renew my subscription. BTW, I tried to go to your fb page to see if there were negative comments there….looks like you have disabled it…too much negativity to handle?

Thanks to Dianna for her post. I am getting tired of all the whining here. If a person doesn’t like Ancestry, they should just leave. I love Ancestry and use it every day. Are there some things that need to be tweaked? Yes. Like being able to continue a search, narrow search results more effectively, or to better view some images. But I don’t know where I’d be without your services. In my opinion, no other website comes close to matching what you can find, do, or learn here. Are there mistakes in people’s trees? Yes, but that can happen anywhere – and can happen to the best of us. As to “Tree Builder” programs, I don’t have Ancestry’s but do have one with another well known genealogy website. Their tree builder software has issues too – nothing’s perfect. Ancestry says you will still be able to use theirs. As for mistakes, I’ve found mistakes at the LDS website and other trusted sites. So, Ancestry please don’t be discouraged by all the negativity. Some folks will never be happy.

Get rid of the colors! That grey background in trees is EXTREMELY annoying. Old Ancestry was way much better. Before everything was in front of you on one page. Now I have to go to multiple pages spending too much time finding what was in front of me before.

I spent an hour and a half watching the videos listed above which was another hour and a half wasted on new Ancestry. I was hoping I would find something that would finally make me say – AHA! now I see the value of New Ancestry. Not a chance, just more propaganda for a poorly thought out, poorly designed website that has ruined “the Ancestry Experience” for me. An experience all right – one that I wish I hadn’t had.

hate it. I can’t work with it. The story view is irrelevant to me but might be great for people starting out. I won’t continue my subscription with this format. There are other systems that I am willing to learn to use. This one really sucks for me. I spend way too much time on ancestry.com anyway. I am sorry that I just renewed my subscription but after so many years, I couldn’t believe the “new” system would be un-workable for me.

When looking up information, I often see the comment “Index Record Only” instead of the actual image. It appears to me that this is more often encountered than on the old “Ancestry”. Does Ancestry have plans to show the actual images in the near future? I hope this is not a means to get Ancestry members to pay to obtain the information that is shown in these records. The new Ancestry is O.K. but I really didn’t see much wrong with the prior version.

Very poor Customer Service, indeed. Ancestry has been trying to force Customers to use the new format for months. They randomly switched me to the new site, and each time, I tried it for a while and then switched back to the old site. Each time I gave them feedback on the cheesy new format. The feedback was never acknowledged. Why do they ask for feedback, when obviously no one is reading it? The new site is cumbersome to use and hard to look at. I don’t like it!

I don’t like the new site but I am staying because of the records. I use many sites. You never know where you will find that bit of information you need. And I find errors in every set of records, even on grave stones. a good genealogist explores all avenues, and spends a lot of time considering what they find.

I agree with folks who have issues with the site. I too have been a long time subscriber. I have posted to the blog and made my complaints known. To those who have to leave, I’m sorry to see you go and I appreciate all you have contributed to the site. You do what you have to do in life. I don’t fault anyone for leaving.

To those who say we are whining when we complain: Don’t read our posts, leave! Ancestry won’t know what our problems are unless we let them know. That doesn’t mean we will get what we want.

Just downloaded the gedcom of my family tree from ancestry.com and I’m uploading it to familysearch.org to give it a try. Really don’t understand why we couldn’t just keep using the old one when so many people here want to continue using the old one and it has co existed with the new one for months.

the new ancestry is awful. it has destroyed our project completely. the life story is a waste – the events you add are useless and waste space. the whole format is a mess. what happened to the overview which was great? you can’t print anything – i get a blank page with ancestry at the top. was that part of the idea of the “new” ancestry? to keep us from printing our information that we have paid for? We have been members for a couple of years and have thoroughly enjoyed it but now i want to quit my membership. Members should have the option to keep the old format. this one is horrible.

Think about it folks… For months ‘old’ Ancestry and ‘new’ Ancestry coexisted. We as customers could toggle back and forth between the two as WE wanted, both versions using the same data source. This tells me then that the reason we can’t have ‘old’ Ancestry is purely a financial decision on Ancestry’s part and has absolutely nothing to do with what we, the customer want. What an arrogant corporate approach to providing customer service’.

I am so disgusted with Ancestry. I just went into a part of my tree and it has ALL gone. ALL that work and research and information. I just can’t believe it. I am computer literate and use tablets, phones etc. However, what idiot decided we needed ancestry on our phones. The data usage alone is not even worth it. I am not a professional but I want my work on a stand alone or my laptop. It must have been someone who doesn’t do this and has no idea about what we actually do. I don’t remember anyone asking me if I wanted a new site where I now can’t do anything. The life story is a bunch of balderdash. DO you really think you know all the nuances of where my ancestors grew up and lived. I am English and grew up where my ancestors come from Really you think you have more info than I do? Your history is suspect at best. I like doing the research into what was happening I don’t want you telling me. What am I an idiot?

If you had sent out a survey to all members and we had responded with info I would have felt happier. However, I strongly suspect your statement “the members had input” is another piece of balderdash.

I have cancelled my subscription because Ancestry is now so hard to use. I used to be able to edit the sources, now who knows how to find the citations. I certainly don’t. If we were given the option of which system we would like to use I may have stayed. I am now looking at other systems that are easier to use and operate. I used to be able to add pictures to clues it was easy. Now where is that option. There are some bogus clues on my tree I don’t have the option to change :
This one added by ancestry I can’t change
Death of Son J Turnacliff – + Barber(1835–1888)
27 Nov 1888 • Wilton, Beltrami, Minnesota, United States
1888
75
I added this and can edit.
Death of His Eldest Son
1888 • Waseca County, Minnesota
His eldest son Jackson pre-deceases him
1888
75
EDIT

Oh and what other idiot decided we could watch a video and magically know how to do anything. I am NOT an auditory learner I need written directions. But know you lot assume we all learn the same way.

I now takes 10 steps to do anything. My hand would ache some nights after all the data entry do you think I want more steps?

Not only will I end my subscription but I will DELETE All my trees. So don;t let me find my tree on your site or I will sue for privacy.

Poof … gone is FTM support and now this! Very bad business decision! I have held a membership for almost 15 years, but as soon as I get all my data, the membership will cease to exist. Indeed, you swamped me with survey’s and indeed, I answered each one … “I didn’t like it. Not suitable for people with disabilities of their hands.”

After readying over 300 of these comments, where are the positive ones? I am not finding any that are positive or any that are endorsing this disaster!

In my opinion, you are gearing up for novice researchers who don’t stick around, but are more of a hit or miss and won’t notice that you have been rotating databases and information. That you are the holder of Newspapers.com and Fold3 and you won’t have to provide those “discounts”. Most likely you’ll try to charge for the information that is out on FindAGrave as soon as you get rid of us. If you didn’t want us as customers any longer, just don’t allow us to renew, but why destroy a product that was working so well and doing so much good?

Kevin M: Where is all of my hard work? You replaced what I had worked very long and hard to format and create on the old ancestry life story feature and now everything I’ve done is no longer there. Instead numerous repeated images that I’ve uploaded to my tree have been inserted into this new life story rubbish. How dare you dispose of my efforts.

Kevin M: Hello… Where did my hard work disappear to?????

Ancestry: Hi Kevin, nothing on your tree would have been removed. You can see all of your sources and information by viewing the Facts page of an individual. The LifeStory page will take the facts that you have added to create the timeline and LifeStory paragraph, which you can edit.

Kevin M: Problem is it had already been extensively edited and formatted by myself and your coding erased all of my work and generated a new life story. Your explanation is not true nor valid. I want my data back the way it was.

Ancestry: If you would like to provide some specific examples of what you believe was erased or changed on your tree and then send us a private message with your username, tree name, and where to look we would be happy to take a look for you.

Kevin M: I was told by the customer service rep that if enough people had the same type of problem as I it would be dealt with priority. With ten years of continuous subscription to the site you would think it would be of importance to maintain a reasonable reputation. Subscription rates have increased regularly and sources have been lagging in respect, now the site management has followed suit. The so called coding experts working on this mess should all be carefully scrutinized for real ability. It can’t be hard to focus on customer feedback and suggestions. I guess they are more interested in splitting the resources up and charging customers to access things on other site that should be contained in basic Ancestry subscriptions (fold3, newspaper). You can’t even print a reasonable file from the site without having to pay outrageous amounts to another subsidiary. I still use a freebie program ancestry used to give away for free and it will print a full blown book if you wish. It is called Ancestry Family Tree, it has not synced with the site for years but that is not necessary for me personally. I will never recommend this site or any subsidiary to another person.

Kevin M: Lifestory is not an editable feature as was implied by the representative above. You have no ability to add, move or delete any of the formatting which was available in Story View. The spiel about being able to edit the paragraph proves that who ever is monitoring this group and running interference doesn’t know the product well. Story View could be saved by the user as a pdf format or printed. The player ooyala this site uses for the media view also had issues loading more than half the times I’ve attempted to access it. Get your act together Ancestry… I want my data back !!!!! Don’t all customers have a legal contract with Ancestry and that requires Ancestry to protect and maintain all client data as part of the subscription agreement. I want my data back !!!!! Can you hear me Kendall Hulet. More over can the Board of Directors hear all of these problems clearly enough?

Whoever designed this isn’t a genealogist, the new ‘improved’ Ancestry is disgusting and I won’t be renewing my sub and I hope everyone follows because then you might actually listen to the people you get your money from.
I’m not trying to be rude but a lot of older people do genealogy they are probably your major contributors and with age comes failing eyes.
Now tell me how many are going to sit on their phone or tablet and enter data on a tiny screen?
Why haven’t you listened because everyone I know hates the new layout.

The slow load, if your lucky to get a page to even load at all is ….absolutely ridiculous and outrageous given the cost of the service. Impossible to get anything done. How does one even “try” to adjust to the new platform when the server/platform is horrific and unable to support subscriber traffic/data. Pathetic.

This is not what I want nor expect. I’ve used the “old version” for many years, did not like the new and likely will do not further research on this site until it meets the needs for which I pay. Sorry but a choice should have been allowed in my books.

I do not like this new format at all. I am refraining from saying that I HATE it but I do NOT like it all. It is NOT an improvement as far as I am concerned. When I spoke last month to a customer service rep I told her the same as she talked me through changing it back to the old format. Then she warned me that the format which I loved and found very easy to navigate through would be obsolete as of the 15th of this month. Is anyone listening to we who are your customers? It seems that no one is.

Your “better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story” is the worst thing I can imagine. I dislike it intensely and will only use it until my current subscription runs out.

Personally, I haven’t formed an opinion yet on the old site vs. the new site. I suspect I will get used to the new site.

HOWEVER, it is taking me forever to do searches tonight on anything…it just spins. I can’t even load pages. It just says “transferring data”. Do I get a refund because I can’t use the site? If I can’t do a search, what’s the point…

I am so disappointed! The new website looks childish, is hard to read, dumbed down, and the features that I used the most are gone. Please bring back the old site. This one will push your paying customers to another site. I will not renew my subscription if this “new” site remains. It is not worth the investment of my time and money.

I have read, and continue to read the barrage/stream of criticisms and complaints from other users and then you come across content by someone like @Dianne, whom I assume is employed by Ancestry, and also only has a dozen or so people on her tree as she just does not appear to “get it”.
The fictitious, incorrect and blatantly racist content on the Lifestory page is an insult to everyone (considering the times we live in now) and dumbing down research to fit on an iphone breaks my heart. I have over 33,000 well sourced and documented people on my tree and for me to have to individually navigate to and then edit each persons “Lifestory” page, is a waste of both my time and my money, and I certainly do not want any of my “invited guests” to see what Ancestry fabricated about their relatives.
Whose brilliant idea was it to centre image titles? This actually contradicts usability standards used by software development teams all over the world. Are they so special at Ancestry that they can just ignore that?
And whilst we’re at it, why can I no longer click on the name of the owner of a retrieved image and EMAIL THEM DIRECT without having to open their profile page and click another couple of buttons, by that time I’ve forgotten what I was going to say in the first place.
Where are ALL my comments? In old Ancestry (and up until recently) we could view/delete comments left by others who visited our trees in one place and were told that the function would be returned in “New Ancestry” SO WHERE IS IT??? The comments section was invaluable as sometimes it could take a few days to get back to do the correction. I do not want to have to go to each individual on my tree (I think I mentioned that I still have over 33,000 people) and to find them, then edit them again takes time (Oh and my money). It also appears we no longer get an email (to our email address) when someone actually does leave us a comment, so we have no idea when people suggest corrections unless they email us…see the paragraph above!!!
Which developer thought it would be a great idea to put a “Save to desktop” and “Delete from tree” function on the same menu. Again goes against usability standards. And SO EASY TO MAKE A MISTAKE. There is no undo, once it’s gone, it is gone!!!
Where is the “Member Connect Activity” screen gone? I used this to see who was copying my information and then ensuring they had it correct at their end, I have had numerous examples where that little bit of info saved someone from copying my image to an incorrect person and then that being proliferated across numerous other trees.
Oh and by the way, Ancestry flat out LIED TO US when they said the changeover to “New” would happen on the 15th, here in Australia we got pushed over on the 13th and the only way I could keep using the “old view” was to select to use the American website instead. Now even that option is gone.
So to the executive who has the balls to actually read some of these comments, what is your reply?

Have been following the comments regarding the New Ancestry and, more recently, the retirement of FTM. I agree with the majority. The new Ancestry interface has lost the serious user for all the reasons posited. Ancestry members who have made their Tree public deserve Ancestry’s gratitude for supplying accurate primary sources and original records which come from intensive serious research in relevant Repositories and for providing original family records, facts, and media. And through a “Green Shaky Leaf” moment, that Ancestry records are least likely to get their hands on, Members have access to rare and wonderful memories and records that would otherwise be forever unknown. With that in mind, Members have a reciprocal relationship with Ancestry. Current changes, which also include mobile interfaces, are too reliant on commercial value rather than academic rigor. I know who my credible member connections are and value them highly. I also use multiple paid and free sites when working online. With the uptake of genealogy over the years generally Members have completed many trees both correct and, unfortunately incorrect. How many years will it take till most Trees are Member connect? I’ve stopped adding family members to allow younger generations the joy of researching etc. So, with what appears to be a poorly consulted and managed changeover of Ancestry online design and function, including the ridiculous idea of an App gaining momentum for serious genealogy, and the incredulous destruction of a best selling software program that allows further enhancement to the years of work done online, one has to ask, who is Ancestry really catering for in the future. Not me! (Long time member)

Ancestry (Mr. Hulet),
You state “we set out to build a better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story”. I have found, as I hear other unsatisfied users say, that this “new” version is difficult for research. Sir, I respectfully disagree with your statement. Color and format that mimics a Pinterest board is hardly user friendly. That is to say, how is color and format for show tell an aid in the discovery of my family history?

Mr. Hulet, do you research your family history? Have you done any research of any sort as a student? A professional? Our personal trees are, in fact, sources of research. We are not interested in sorting out the story, rather we are on a quest for information, data, and facts for the purpose of researching our histories.

I have called Customer Service and discussed in detail how insulting your company is to us, the loyal customers, who have invested our money into your mission as a store-house of historical documents. Sir, I have respected Ancestry as the curator of our world documents and my research! I feel unvalued and unappreciated as a loyal customer who has trusted you to be committed to the value of access to knowledge and skill in the art of historical EVIDENCE, not presentation.

Sir, I believe you have ignored the input of your customers who are dedicated to continued research. WE are the ones who remain focused and encourage others as well. You rely on our eagerness to correct documents, provide feedback on transcription errors, grow your database through customer paid DNA profiles, and of course, Ancestry’s recruitment of VOLUNTEER transcribers who are the very same researchers voiced here on your blog… those who pay for your service to provide evidentiary materials in our quest.

Finally, Mr. Hulet, it is rather rude to boast of your “global” use of the new Ancestry. What choice do we have? Ancestry did not have to make any change in order to insure its continued success or marketability. Improvements? Why not. However, this version is not about research or documenting. It’s a scrapbook that is, well, for lack of a better term… it’s dumbed-down like a Common Core approach to looking at a scrapbook. Sure, change is oftentimes difficult. The insult, again, is that the customers should “see the writing on the wall” as we Hem and Haw through the minutia of this new site. I’d love to hear what Dr. Spencer Johnson would have to say to the drastic changes this company has made expecting the customer to move with the cheese being offered here.

EXTREMELY disappointed, Sir! A decline in reputable status from Curator to a virtual scrapbook.

I have been working with the new format. It is a little Slower than what it was with Family Tree. No one likes change. They would rather sit in their old routine, but given time they will adjust. My problem now is that about 4 four nights ago I got a Trojan in my computer and it took all My Family Tree Maker, program, data base and all. I was wondering if any one else experienced this, too. Right now I have no genealogy program or files. I am so glad I had updated some things on Ancestry. I can begin again to rebuild my data since I have to start all over after 40 to 45 years I will research for another genealogy program since you all are not going to support Family Tree Maker anymore. I do love your ancestry.com website and look forward to doing work with you all in the future.

I would like to echo many of the other comments. The new ancestry format may take a while to get used to but I will never get used to the new garish color scheme. CHANGE THE COLORS. I can’t take it for more than 5 minutes. Really? Is this the best you could do? I think a lot is left to be desired with this new format. Too much to go into right now but somebody didn’t learn the childhood lesson “If it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it.”

I have been an Ancestry subscriber for many years, FTM user and have used the DNA service of Ancestry many times. As I sit today looking at an inferior Ancestry site and face replacing FTM with “who knows what” I am troubled by the downward spiral of a company that I used to recommend and praise. As I am set to renew in January I find myself doubting that I want to proceed with Ancestry. If we are all suffering for Ancestry’s thirst of the all mighty dollar I resent paying for a dumbed down program. I am obviously not alone in this thinking. Please rethink letting subscribers use the old Ancestry and not be FORCED into this lesser new Ancestry and keep FTM as a work that you can be proud of. Your downfall is a huge loss to the genealogy community.

Despise the new format. Will not be renewing next year. I have been a loyal customer and user for over a decade but no more. I refuse to pay the exorbitant amount you charge for the use of knowledge that should be free. We don’t mind paying a small amount but now you have turned the website into a cute little place for the 20-30 somethings to breeze through while drinking their double shot lattes at Starbucks. Enjoy your drop in memberships!

The new interface works well for me and has inspired me to break away from linear tree building and explore time and place within my family branches. I’ve spotted errors more easily with family data interspersed in the timelines. Life Stories allows me to look at my research from different and multiple perspectives, so I appreciate having it as an option. The probate and wills databases made available this year helped me break through long-time brick walls.

Did you actually get customer feed back about the new site? I don’t think you pay any attention to what people have been saying about the updated site. The Facebook page is filled with 99% negative comments about the horrible updated site. I have been working on a tree for over 10 years and will discontinue doing so on this site with this hideous version. I would fire who ever reformatted the site immediately. I don’t think you guys have ever heard the old saying if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

We, your customers are what have built your company and now you have repaid us by destroying what was a useful tool to true genealogists all in the name of corporate greed. Like all the other comments, I will not be renewing my national/international membership, which by the way is too expensive for what I have not gained from its use. I will not now or ever use your apps for a smart phone or tablet. I have worked with computers for over 30 years, so am not afraid to learn new things that come along. Serious genealogists want to use equipment that will hold all our data and be easy to read. I am not opposed to change when it is for the better and in this case the changes are not. I hope this “Kendall Hulet” is happy with the way he has ruined Ancestry.

Take this failure down and give your paying customers back what we bought. We should not have to hunt and peck around to find functions that used to be intuitive. Some of these new functions don’t work right even after they are found. You have been sold a bill of goods by your software department, or by your sub-contractor. Give us back the old interface until you have made significant improvements to this wildly disappointing experience. I stopped using your site tonight after messing with it for a couple of frustrating hours. The longer you wait to admit your gross failure, the more paying customers are going to opt out.

That says it all. Typed a question into your customer service help function and the top answer was an explanation on how to do it on an iPhone or an iPad. That’s what this change is all about. I’m not sitting at an internet cafe, sipping a latte. I’m at home wanting to work on my family tree, but all I get now is a Windows 8.0 option! Hurry up with a Windows 8.1 option so I can go back to the old user-interface that worked great and was easy to use. I’m not on a tablet!

On the Family Historian site:
UPDATE: Following the recent announcement by Ancestry that Family Tree Maker is to be discontinued, we have received many enquiries from FTM users. See Family Historian Welcomes Family Tree Maker Users for details of a special upgrade offer for FTM users. See also Frequently Asked Questions for Family Tree Maker Users for more information and useful links.

I did not renew my subscription to Ancestry because I do not like the New Ancestry. After paying for my DNA test, i can’t even view it because I no longer have an account. No more Ancestry for me and I will tell others not to sign up. Not worth the trouble.

Well I certainly hope Ancestry will provide increased functionality and capabilities that will give you a great Ancestry experience whether you use the Ancestry site on your desktop, phone or tablet so that you can fill the immense void that will be caused by the removal of FTM from the Ancestry stable. This purely economic decision of Ancestry, is a bad decision in my opinion and will financially disadvantage many not to mention inconvenience even more. I certainly hope that this immensely unpopular decision to scrap FTM will be reviewed very quickly. Maybe the Ancestry Santa will bring us tiding of good new! Ancestry online tree is basically a beginners program without flexibility and not even decent print option…gee Ancestry when are you going to get the online tree more functional. Yes I know your bread and butter comes from the ‘new users’ but what about your long term customers?

2003 I started my family tree with Ancestry.2015 I LEFT. Not only did I source records ,but I helped people with their brickwalls. Shame on you for wasting a brilliant site for geneologists. YOU need to transcribe yourselves.

I think were all in agreement that the new Ancestry site is no good. Hard to find what your looking for and navigate, which means it takes a lot longer to add in new information. You would think with these many disappointed customers, that they would get a clue, and just switch back to the old version.

There are so many issues with the New Ancestry and its usability. I sent two lists of issues to you back in August when it was first released (your feeble attempt at beta testing, I presume). I was appalled then and even more so now. I worked 20 years in the software industry. It does not matter how fantastic and efficient the software is. If the user interface sucks, the users won’t use it. And the New Ancestry user interface sucks big time. You took a really great product and trashed it. Hovering over a person on the tree to see their key info no longer functions. You have to click twice to get to the person’s page to view the info. Once there, you can no longer click to view the person’s family tree. You have to back-click until you reach the tree. I loved Old Ancestry’s ability to search for and link documents and to integrate information, even though it had no capability to create charts and reports (except thru synching with FTM — oh yes, another fee to pay). Every data warehouse in use can generate charts and reports, except Ancestry. I have been a loyal user and cheerleader of Ancestry for over 5 years, despite how much more it costs now than 5 years ago. But come April when it is time to renew my subscription I will be going elsewhere.

When the New Ancestry was introduced I tried it, didn’t like it, and switched back to the Old. When you asked why I told you that I didn’t like, among othere things, the Life Story which made a lot of things up or misinterpreted facts. I am an experienced genealogist and if I want to write my Life Story or any of my ancestors Life Story I will do it in my own words. The fact that you can’t even disable the feature is extremely frustrating. You have so many negative comments on this blog I think you should seriously consider the wisdom of shutting down the old site, and reinstate it immediately. New is not always better as is shown in this instance. .

I have been an Ancestry member for many years. While I have yet to try out the new format, I respect the opinion of the many people who have and want to have a choice of formats. This could be my last subscription if the customer base continues to be ignored.

I’ve notifed Customer Service no to renew my subscription come January 2016. If by some miracle the powers that be can reign in their egos and acknowledge that the “new” intreface is a disaster I and provide the option to us the “old” will gladly renew.

I cancelled my subscription a few months ago when I saw this coming. Have started up a website with my cousin, trying to get our trees of over 30,000 transferred. And, I just purchased RootsMagic to replace my FTM.. I miss the classic, intuitive ancestry tree format. The new ancestry has distorted my tree and is just way too much work for something I was paying for. I kept reading the blogs, hoping they would see the light, I would have resubscribed instantly.. Goodbye Ancestry.com!

I’m assuming that this year’s 16% rise in subscription price has gone towards funding this debacle? I wasn’t happy that my annual fee had shot up to £179.99, but reasoned that the enjoyment I got from using the Ancestry site justified the £15 per month it worked out at; however,
I’m assuming that this year’s 16% rise in subscription price has gone towards funding this debacle? I wasn’t happy that my annual fee had shot up to £179.99, but reasoned that the enjoyment I got from using the Ancestry site justified the £15 per month it worked out at.

However, what I ‘bought’ in August no longer exists: the new Ancestry site is slow, ugly, and inaccurate; even before the changes I had been forced to waste time checking dozens & dozens of hints which turned out not only to be irrelevant, but so improbable that I fail to understand how they were ever offered to me: baptisms taking place fifty or a hundred years before the birth of a person, marriages long after a death; I have had to check and delete so many of these that I’ve had little time left for true family history research. And now, if I wish to pursue my research I’m forced to squander yet more time & energy trying to navigate around a site that is now the opposite of user-friendly; I have persevered to get used to it, but if anything am finding it harder with every visit.

Since the site is no longer fit for purpose I will not be renewing my subscription, and doubt I’ll be getting much use out of my remaining 8 months; this means that the research I’ve done since August will have cost me £45 per month – outrageous!

I’m struck by the very high quality of written English in these comments, indicating that we are intelligent, educated and serious subscribers. We have enough time to be contirbuting here, and many of us have enough money to subscribe long-term. We are treasure. Pearls before swine.

Wish I could press “like” on just about every comment above – at least good to know that I am not the only one who is fed up with these so called “improvements” – what a joke! Can’t find anything except trillions of duplicates of stuff I already have – what a waste of time – should not have renewed recently.

I have tried twice now to come to grips with this appalling new site. I am an IT professional and normally welcome updates and innovations but this “new” Ancestry is just a joke. User unfriendly to the nth degree, patronising in its “Lifestory” feature, extremely difficult to read family trees, clumsy, clunky and untrustworthy – the list goes on. Why fix something that is not broken. “Old” Ancestry was (although not perfect) a pleasure to work with which kept me engaged and coming back to continue my research. Now my heart sinks every time I open the site. Please, please, please at least give us the option to use the “old” layout.

What you, and many other software providers such as Microsoft and Adobe, are failing to recognise is that we users don’t want or need to have the same experience on all platforms…mobile phone, tablet, laptop, desktop pc. Each tool has its uses and what you are doing is dumming down the experience to the lowest common denominator which is usually the mobile phone. I don’t like the new Ancestry which to me is too much like the android app. Like many above I will review my position when it comes to renewal time, and may end up voting with my feet!

Actually, I need to give Ancestry my sincere thanks for all the changes they have made. Through the years, as I was putting my family tree together, I became addicted to the old Ancestry and Family tree maker, spending countless hours on both of them when I should’ve been doing something else. The new Ancestry took away all the enjoyment I got from working on their website, and in doing so, it broke my addiction. So, thanks Ancestry! I’ve canceled my subscription and I’m moving on to something else. Tennis anyone?

1. The old ancestry was user friendly. The new one comes complete with many webinars to show people how to use it.
2. Somehow the new ancestry corrupted the data on about half the people that were in my tree. Added incorrect information (I saw a post that said this could not happen.. it did. My ?gg X Fish was not buried in Fish, florida and nowhere on his page was Florida mentioned. But the ancestry changed his burial place from Maine to Fish, Florida). Hundreds and hundreds of errors created. The thing is when I deleted my tree and cancelled my subscription, all those errors became part of Ancestry’s data base to foist off on new customers. So anyone paying ancestry in the future is paying for erroneous information that Ancestry created. I deleted my tree (9 years of work) because there was no way, especially using the new ancestry, that I could correct all the errors that got put in my tree. Two years ago, if asked I would have rated ancestry in the top 5 trustworthy companies. Now they are ROCK BOTTOM.

Why do we have to put up with this horrible new version. Why doesn’t ancestry listen to its members. Why don’t we have something to say about something that is user friendly. I am going to save all my info and cancel my subscription.

We users are being faced with a brutal reality. The Ancestry management doesn’t care a bit about the long term customer who has spent countless hours over many years developing our family trees to be proud of. Why less would they wipe out our unique, respectable, and dignified trees, replaced with the (often said) dumbed-down ‘new ancestry’ which makes one’s tree look like a child’s picture book? I doubt Ancestry management even reads (or cares) about our comments, concerns. Some yahoo ( no disrespect to Yahoo) has moved Ancestry toward the point of irrelevancy for us, sadly. The damage done by Ancestry management is unforgivable.

Life Story adds insult to injury. My grandfather was born near Fort Smith Arkansas in 1857. His Life Story states that he “might have appeared in court before Judge Isaac Parker” who was better known during those times as the “hanging Judge”. What an insult to even suggest such a thing. Hulet should be tarred and feathered for incorporating such complete rubbish into a once wonderful site.

Watch LIFE STORY for another discrepancy. For those of us who used a prefix before the date (i. e. before or bef / about or abt / or after or aft), LIFE STORY is ignoring the prefix and is picking the date up as an absolute. I have sent an email to the developers about this.

Ancestry, I HATE this ‘new’ format. I only renewed my subscription 3 weeks ago but I didn’t renew it only to get this worthless, childlike, messy format. I renewed it because I thought I would be getting the old format. Therefore, can you please tell me how I can get my subscription refunded as it is NOT what I paid for?

I am disgusted with Ancestry and their total disregard for their loyal customers. The new format is not user friendly and, as an experienced genealogist, no longer the useful tool it was. You have a lot of nerve charging such exorbitant subscription rates for such a poor product. I have been a member for many years, I am a Message Board Admin and I spend most of my time helping other members in their searches. Well, that has come to an end – I have cancelled my subscription. I’m sure Ancestry with only care if enough of us leave.

Anyone at Ancestry, apart from the mediator, listening? We hate your childish new update and many of us will take our money elsewhere just as soon as we can. And have you seen your review on Facebook lately? Down to 2.3 and continuing to sink.

Trying to adjust to this new monstrosity called New Ancestry. I don’t seem to have problems like others have mentioned but I just started going through all 2,500 on my tree. What I do object to is, lack of records. What is this nonsense of index only? What good does that do me? None. so, this is what happens when an equity firm buys a company — bottom line oriented and customers be damned. When will Ancestry wake up and return to the genealogy research they used to do. this new stuff is NOTHING to be proud of, and removing FTM is like a stab in the back.

I have been a ancestry subscriber for years. I will not be renewing my membership when it is up in April. Terrible format, incorrect relationships, missing information, and visually confusing. Sometimes, it is better to leave well enough alone. And it is apparent that Ancestry will not listen to their customers.

Another thing…. Regrettably I have had to email each of my 29 family ‘invites’ to my private tree, advising them of the ‘New Ancestry’ debacle. In the past I had spoke highly of Ancestry, and with pride of the tree in Ancestry. In this new email I have let family know of the necessity to find a new home for our family history, to a site that can be trusted and respected, as Ancestry no longer can be. I have also advised them to be very leery of Ancestry the company, should they wish to develop their own trees in the future, and to let their extended families, and friends, to be very leery too. I would hate that my past praise of Ancestry be the basis of future disappointment like that we have suffered with ‘New Ancestry’. Frankly, I was embarrassed to have send such an email, when they (family) have entrusted me with their photos, stories, etc to be housed for future family members. It seems that by using Ancestry, I have betrayed their trust.

Good News! I used some of my anger and frustration to read my fellow users comments and something good has come out of this. I promise that I will now rebuild my family tree using only data that I can document from source material. Once I complete my rebuild (in FTM) I will see where the majority of my colleagues have migrated to and will join them there. So, some good has come from this – in the future my trees will be as error free as I can possibly make them. Thanks Ancestry for helping me become a better researcher. Oh, and goodbye.

Well done Ancestry! My Great, Great, Great Grandather died in a coal mine disaster in Tudhoe, Durham, England. Your lifestory, and map, now shows’ He died ‘on April 21, 1882, in Indiana, ‘ Well done….. Does this mean I now have to check everyone else. Didn’t your IT team do ANY testing on this new system?

First let me thank you for Ancestry.com. I have traced my ancestry twice now all the way back to Adam and Eve.

I wanted to take the time to tell you what I use Family Tree Maker for. I would welcome these features in Ancestry.com since you are discontinuing Family Tree maker:

– Location Information – The ability to see all the people from one specific area like Granville, NC is a must. This can help you see how families are related and who else is in the area that is in your tree but you haven’t connected the dots. I have found siblings that married siblings this way that I never would have found just looking at records.

– A feature on Ancestry.com that provides a map, and the ability to drill down into locations would be so helpful. I would love to click on a City, State or Country and then have a list of all the people in my tree who are associated with that area appear.

– The ability to build your own report like in Family Tree

Additional features I would love to see:

– The ability to download a records query in an Excel or CVS file would be so helpful. Especially for the census records. When I am searching a slave schedule and I am looking for all 8 year old mulatto males in 1960 from Washington Parish, Louisiana that would save me hours of looking through each individual record.

– DNA Matches – it would be great if we could search our DNA matches by the actual results. For example to be able to search all DNA matches who have Native American could help me hone in on who is a Choctaw cousin, now I have to go through each match, again taking hours of time.

– The ability to download 1) my tree and 2) current DNA matches into a CVS file. More options for people that want to search on a more granular level.

– Bring back the DNA X and Y split on males tests so we can see who matches on the Father’s side and who matches on the Mother’s side.
~ My Grandfather (paternal) was adopted, I have tested my father but I have no idea who matches on the mother’s side vs the father’s side. They are from Belgium and I don’t have a lot of information but my dad matches a ton of people – no clue how, this would help point me in the right direction.
~ My grandfather (maternal) is the descendant of a white slave holder which we discovered via DNA. Seeing who matches where (mom/dad) would be so helpful. I would know the maternal matches are not going to help me find my ancestry for this lineage – right now I am going blind.
~ My great-grandmother’s (maternal) are half sisters (not uncommon with Native American heritage) so being able to see who matches again on my grandfather (maternal) side would help me isolate is it an X or Y match.
~ The ability to search slave records, like buyer lists (not census) by the slave owner or location, more search options

Kendall Hulet must be secretly working for a rival company. I don’t think hackers could have done a better job at destroying the website than Kendall Hulet.

Whoever is his senior please sack him very publically and anyone else involved in the up coming downfall of ancestry.

I can’t think of any other website where there has been so much hostility from it’s members and where the website has ignored them. No other company in history has been so stupid as to not heed the wrath of it’s members.

If you really do appreciate feedback then surely you need to act on the above. It seems there was a lot of negative feedback from the American site in June which was also ignored. I COMPLETELY AGREE with the vast majority of comments above. I HATE the new site and yes it hurts my eyes too. Not just aesthetically (its dreadful) but actual strain because of the contrast between colours. Also I can’t see the logic of the most important information on the page being the smallest actual component – i.e. the names take up a fraction of the space the majority consists of pointless graphics – need I mention the stereotypical blue and pink – either way if you are going to colour code you don’t need the pointless heads. The continual scrolling also causes eye strain – you can only see a small amount of the tree at any one time. All the above I could reiterate especially the over all dumbing down of the site (which like many above I used to recommend) – it all but useless now for the level of research that I and many others above primarily used it for. I don’t want to spend my money on something that is painful to look at and no longer carries out its valuable functions. What on earth was wrong with the site that made you want to change it – the document viewer could be slow and had issues at times but that was eventually fixed – otherwise it was a clear, accessible site with useful information. Now its a mess. After so many years and such a good reputation – what a shame.

Everyone who’s written anything before me has said it all. I can only repeat what they’ve said. WHO THE HELL GOT HOLD OF ANCESTRY and STUFFED IT UP GOOD AND SOLID!!! I have NO access to all my hard work on MY tree – can’t even get access to pictures on the pages for King Edward VII, or any of the other Royals, so I can’t add anymore pictures. Who’s bright idea was it to limit the number of pictures we’re allowed? I pay a small fortune to have access to Ancestry, and I’m REALLY unhappy about the treatment. Please give us back the option of using the old format. Give us back our pictures, and OUR hard work. We paid for the privilege. Also, PLEASE don’t add so-called historical events to our pages, without doing the necessary research. In my case, referring to me as having been part of the apartheid era is an insult!!! I had the misfortune to be born one year after the apartheid govt came to power – my parents definitely DID NOT VOTE FOR THEM!!!! I object in the strongest terms. Furthermore, please do some history checking before making statements like “gold was discovered in SA in 1925!!! For pete’s sake – it was discovered at the end of the 19th century!! I’m really fed up, and will be looking around for an alternative to start a new tree. I’ve done so much work on my tree, I could weep, but if I have to move, then so be it. You’re going to lose big time, but then you don’t seem to care, because we can’t even contact you anymore. Furthermore, no-one seems to be manning your Facebook page – I’ve had NO response to my pleas for help. Also, the option to look at the family members has gone AWOL!!!! It’s just not there anymore. Come on Ancestry – try really listening to your members, instead of bluffing us. Our money is good enough – your service just went down the ‘chute!!!

Now that I’ve calmed down from my initial reactions, I’ve decided to give one week for ancestry to reverse this DEBACLE. We all makes mistakes. This was a BIG one. You sure got our attention ancestry. Do you realize that if you keep the site the way it is now, your base customers will all leave in droves. With that, your AncestryDNA section, which was just starting to make some headway, will no longer have DNA circles, as people will have left the site. That means people will no longer test their DNA. Getting it? All the hard work to expand the site will all be in vain. Like I say, I will give one week to reverse to the old site, or at least make “Old Ancestry” be an option again. If management decides to stay with this “new ancestry”, which looks very much like other genealogy programs (which I can’t stand) I will take my business elsewhere. How many people will it take before you listen and change back? I am also not seeing any replies back from management here on this blog. Sure feels like you don’t care. I want a reply. Thank you.

When I cancel it’s an extra $20/mo he can spend on his Starbucks card so that he can go sip lattes and do his programming work on his phone.

I lie, but only about programming on his phone.

While we CAN go in and tweak this or that via the phone, serious front-end engineering work, like any sane person’s, is done on the laptop, or better still at our desks, where laptops can be plugged into monitors so that we can spread our virtual work out and see it all at once. I find working on genealogy to be very similar in many respects, in terms of effective workflow.

I have Ancestry on my phone. AT BEST, it’s only good for quick lookups. As with trying to program a website with a phone, it’s simply the wrong tool for that task, even if in theory it could be done. And my phone is a late-model one with top-of-the-line for 2015 specs. It’d be awful for even lookups on anything less. Awful.

I was hanging around to see if Ancestry’d do the smart thing, and keep New and Classic both available. That might have stemmed the outflow of their best customers, and there’s no good reason not to have done so. None. But nooooooo.

So yeah, I’m gonna take my ball and follow the old people – you know, the Luddites who are so afraid of change that they’re

* upending years of research here,

* bending GEDCOM to their will, and

* learning new software and new web interfaces at places such as MyHeritage and GEDmatch.

The same old fogeys whom Ancestry sees fit to demean with patronizing suggestions that they should watch videos and just try a little harder.

(UX 101, guys – if _anyone_ needs to watch an hour and a half worth of videos to effectively use a consumer web product, you’re not doing it right!)

I’m following them because they provide the value. The old customers Ancestry’s tossing aside in pursuit of the new shiny put the data into context and turn it into information.

While I am not a Millennial, I know and work with many, and they’re pretty universally interested in value, accuracy, and truth. Ancestry’s headed down the wrong path if they think that look-and-feel is their big driver.

“Give Ancestry a chance” some are suggesting. Sure. They always have a chance to regain me as a customer. All they need to do is to resume an offering that meets my needs and more importantly, the needs of the serious genealogist.

I find it amazing, just like a number of other members, that Ancestry state they have upgraded the site to the new look that members were asked about. Just like many other comments, I do not recall being asked and like so many others preferred the old site. It isn’t a case of not liking it because it’s new, but because it has new features that bring nothing in the way of improvement. Before the compulsory changeover I tried the new look and whenever I reverted back the drop down questionnaire asked why I was leaving and I opted for the “I don’t like the look or new features”. I probably was not the only one lokking at the comments posted, so where does Ancestry get the idea this is what it’s members wanted. Like others I have removed my tree and have cancelled my subscription. I will continue to use the site and my copy of FTM until they both “expire”, but have downloaded for free full genealogy tree software and will use rival sites for my research. It’s really sad that, what once was a great site has lost touch with it’s members and their needs.

Sorry Ancestry you had a good research site once, but not any more. After 15+ happy years of family research and thousands of pounds later you’ve just lost another customer, I won’t be renewing my subscription. The new website design is simply awful and child like.

I don’t know what Ancestry is planning to do about all the complaints but ignoring the situation is not going to make it go away. It does seem a lot of people are taking action by canceling subscriptions and deleting trees from the web site. I was just looking at the list of DNA matches and it is amazing at the number of people who no longer have trees listed, or there tree is no longer available. Ancestry you better wake up and listen to large number of customers that are not happy.

This new site is absolute rubbish and I am totally dissolutioned. After checking just a few people in my tree I find that there are numerous errors caused by Ancestry i.e I have people born in Hampshire UK who now appear as being born in America, some in Canada and this is after checking just a few – goodness knows what else is now incorrect. Luckily my subsscription is due for renewal on the 28 December but I have CANCELLED!!! I have been a member since 2004 and have endured several updates over the years but this is the final straw!!!!!!! Please listen to your subscribers without us you are nothing…..

I agree with MKath–New Ancestry is still a defective product and should be recalled until ALL the problems have been resolved. I don’t know who suggested the changes that have been made, but they probably don’t do serious genealogy. –

I have been working in NEW for about a month now as I figured you were NOT going to listen to your customers about keeping the preferred OLD version.

I keep finding things that don’t work correctly–and file email complaints every time I find them–

We STILL do not have a print preview to the PRINT on facts page…there are many reasons we should be able to preview before we print…the last time I tried to print that page (before you even had a print button) I got 10+ pages on someone that did not include family members OR sources…

I LIKE have print preview so I can copy and paste the info into other applications such as WORD or an email to someone trying to help me with a particular person.

There should be a print preview with EVERY print screen so we can see what we would be printing before we waste paper.

When add ing several people to a story I USED to be able to copy and paste the various peoples names from the tree thus making adding people go faster–now I have to type in every single individual.

When adding a source out of card catalog there is only 1 box for what type of data is in that source–MANY of the sources in card catalogs I used have birth, marriage, death info–BUT you only have ONE drop down menu–there shoudl be at least 3 so I can add these all at one time–instead I have to go back 3 or more times to add the source over and over and over in order for it to show up properly and be properly linked to the event.

SO many things are hidden, and you cannot even mouse over to try to find the various functions…it is like playing Hide N Seek–the OLD version was pretty self explanatory–the NEW is like playing “The Price is Right” trying to figure out which door to pick.

Everything in NEW takes more time, more steps, more hunting…it has slowed down my research considerably–

IMPROVEMENTS should NOT show you down or create MORE work–they should make things faster and easier.

The NEW version does the opposite–I cannot beleive you went ahead with the date of the 15th to stop OLD when NEW is still not functioning correctly…

I spend more time sending in info on things I find that are either not working at all, or not working correctly these days than anything else.

This year you have put your customers through a LOT–including the last minute notice about FTM 2014–which I jumped through a lot of hoops to get, only to find out cust svc gave me incorrect info when i asked if I could set it up on external drive–it worked for a total of about 30 minutes before it blew up (after doing something the cust svc tech told me to do when trying to get reports to run properly).

I have serious reservations about downloading 2014 again…I ALMOST lost my tree of 10,000 ppl as when it blew up the tech did not have the sense to tell me to disconnect sync through website before uninstall–Had I not thought to ask him about that I would have lost 15 years of hard work…as I am NOT one of those folks who just copy trees, I have over 2000 documents as photo’s supporting the various people in my tree—I would have lost everything!

I used to recommend ancestry.com all the time…now I don’t even want to do that…I don’t feel like I can rely on your cust svc support, or even whether ancestry.com will be around in 10 years…you certainly have ticked off your customer base by doing things SO many of us aasked you NOT to do–we like OLD better–It looked better, worked better and had more functionality than NEW…

There are so many things you could have spent that money on and it would have been spent more wisely…instead you stuck us with this mess that YOU say is better–

PLEASE give us back the option to remain on Old Ancestry. Have to go to a dropdown just to see a tree? No way to sort and send a received message to a folder? A useless “Story Line” that should be a Little Golden Book? And no. I do not now and never will, do my genealogy research with a cellphone. New Ancestry is a joke. FAIL FAIL FAIL.

As others have commented before the new ancestry takes many more mouse clicks to view what was visible on one page before. I suspect this was intentional so that down the road as ads are added to all the dark space at the top of each page the extra clicking will generate more ad revenue. In this light getting rid of FTM also makes sense as there is no ad revenue from that.
The want to bring those FTMer’s online so they can click around and generate a steady stream of ad revenue.

The new ancestry is an absolute Joke. As an author and a writer, I resent your tech people misusing 30 + years of research used to author my stories regarding my family lines migration and contributions as citizens of their respective communities in which they resided while helping to establish the United States of America. This information came from personal knowledge, interviews, copies of bible records, land deeds, and family histories compiled by my ancestors before there ever was an entity such as ancestry.com and you scrambling the facts around in such a manner as to appear as if Your Organization and other members were the original contributing author/editor of my information. Plagiarism is frowned on and as a publisher you should know this.

The broad spectrum of historical facts included in the timeline is a distraction and totally un-necessary in a family’s personal history. If anything, it should be ‘add only tool’ by the subscriber.

Your new format in not ‘user’ friendly, nor is it straight forward and easy to navigate without continuous scrolling back and forth.

I must be candid and tell you I will not recommend ancestry.com to anyone for genealogical use; nor will I invite anyone to join my tree because I detest this monstrosity you have forced down your paying customer’s throats.

Shame on your CEO and/or your administrators for taking advantage of everybody and changing a once ‘superb’ genealogical format into a nightmare.

I and not you own ‘the Intellectual Copyright’ to all my material I have shared with you since I first subscribed. I will not renew.

Well here I am again, now not so dear ancestry. It is 16 Dec 2015 and after ONE DAY! I am just FED UP! I have been here for 15 years and unless you use some COMMON SENSE in this situation I will not subscribe again. Why can’t we at least have the option to choose which format we want?? The new ancestry is the most god awful ugly thing I have seen in many a year! I wasn’t even born til almost 1960, and you have me living in Mercer, New jersey in 1942…REALLY? I have never even been to New Jersey! And certainly not before I was even born! So tedious and unfulfilling it is for me after ONE day, when before I was on every day! Ancestry you have managed after just ONE DAY to totally muck up one of my joys in life. Thanks for NOTHING ancestry!

I am saddened by the comments here- not because most are negative – my sentiments are too, even though I can live with the new – but because each comment reminds us of what researchers have lost in the transition of the change to the new. No, I don’t expect the new to go away – so all I can do is struggle to see it, and to make needed suggestions to the developers in hopes they hear and respond.

The new is more difficult to see and to remain on the site for very long. The clutter and colors and excessive moves all contribute to that. The new is cumbersome and less efficient because of the number of clicks to accomplish once simple tasks. The new is flashy to the point of distraction with “crawly” screens with cursor movement and the pop-up purple. The new has seriously altered (via LIFE STORY) a significant number of the individuals I have reviewed in my tree. The new LIFE STORY (nice as the idea is and as nicely as it does treat some in my tree ) is not something I want others to see and have, sadly, made my tree private and unsearchable – until – just maybe – some of the kinks can be worked out.

Was new ready for release before these problems were solved – No! Am I afraid to make changes for fear they will be in vain should the new go back to Dec 15 default (my idea only) in order to make corrections – Absolutely! Do I ask for a two-column work page in old colors to continue actual tree building – Yes! Am I continuing to try to review my tree, keep a list of the LIFE STORY wrongs (34,000 people to review!) and go forward – Maybe! But I AM trying -and wish Ancestry – and all of us the best. They do remain the receptacle of my tree. I may not need my subscription renewal in February just to “fix” the LIFE STORY wrongs I am now finding, however, That could take the rest of my time!

For those who don’t like how they have been treated (for various reasons) by Ancestry.com, complaints can be filed through the Better Business Bureau, Provo, Utah branch. This is the TinyURL link: http://tinyurl.com/nt9hvz6

Ancestry Mgt: I can’t speak as to how bad my data is or isn’t on new Ancestry, I can’t get beyond the stupidity of the appearance of the new presentation. AT LEAST have the decency to do a simple change, to put in three configuration on/off settings within Settings: Lifestory (on/off), Family Event (on/off) and Historical Insight (on/off). Then the owner of a tree could at least turn off the absurdity of some these new ‘features’ you felt we needed to get. The owner of the tree should be able to designate what appears within their tree, not Ancestry mgt. Give us a way to get rid of these inane ‘improvements’ if we want.

Delighted with the color palette and the appearance, but it so buggy I cannot continue any serious research at this time. Can you give us a timeline for the necessary fixes needed to bring it up to a reasonably comparable system to the, now defunct, old site?

Ancestry Mgt: I can’t speak to the data integrity issues that may be present with new Ancestry, I can’t get beyond my disgust with the horrible appearance of the tree format now. At least give each tree owner the opportunity to determine what appears on their tree. Program on/off designations within ‘Settings’ for Life Story, Family Event, and Historical Insight, that would be effective globally across all persons IN the tree, VIEWING the tree, or INVITED to the tree. The owner of the tree should have the right to designate what is in one’s tree. The owner should not have to accept inane features like these three above. Give us a way to turn them off, get them out of our trees!

I’ve been an active and careful user for years, and I agree that the latest changes are not designed for “us.” The user named “Jock” above really nailed it – the redesign is for novices, and the more serious folks will need to move along to another ecosystem. Here’s one bit of interesting – sobering – news for the Ancestry management team, though: site traffic is falling despite the recent rush of advertisements. You can catch a glimpse of their traffic here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ancestry.com Notice that they’ve been falling since the first week in October. And if you look at their competitors… all of their competition is heading in the opposite direction – up. This is good news, I think, because the rest of the market will be innovating to compete for our business. I have spent thousands (yes, thousands) on Ancestry. It will be interesting to see where I can spend my money more effectively going forward. I’m up for the challenge.

Those of you who are considering changing to Family Search. This site is also owned by LDS Ancestry! Yesterday, I tried Find My Past, I don’t recommend this site at all. The screen Trees are so small, and no option to enlarge. The process to find and enter data is plain stupid! I also belong to Wiki Tree, it still does not compare and it is difficult to get around at first. Genealogy Bank is not worth the time either.

I do not like this new format that Ancestry seems to be determined to foist on its members!

However may I offer this advise; Our brain has a certain level of brain memory, just like muscle memory. This new format can become comfortable, once we get on it and retrain our brains on how to use it.

We can delete the horrible ‘Life Story’ additions that Ancestry took upon themselves to invent a ‘Life Story.’ Most of the info here if non-relevant to your ancestor…just edit it out. What a total waste of time….a grab bag of crap!

Please, let’s not give our head space so much free rent to Ancestry’s attempt to improve what wasn’t broken. Ancestry doesn’t know or care that these changes have had such an impact.

P.S ancestry…the LAST thing I want to see on my own page…right at the very TOP is that my father died when I was 2! And I darn well HATE having to scroll, scroll and scroll, when before I could see EVERYTHING at a glance! This is a bunch of c#@p for serious researchers!

Folks, they are just following the Microsoft model. Next we will have to up load our trees to the “Cloud”. Then, like Microsoft, they will be able to charge us a monthly “fee” to access our data. Got to give them credit, they are now playing with the Big Boys. But can they pull it off?

I hate the new Ancestry and will be looking for a better way to do my family tree. No one asked me if I liked the new Ancestry and it seems a lot more people feel the same way. You just ruined a good thing and I am sorry I didn’t know the cut off date or I would have made copies for my family scrapbook.

As I do every so often I seek feedback from the member community that I know which probably numbers over 300 people, maybe more. Yesterday at the turn of the New Site forced on the membership my most recent surveys find less than 1% of the people have any interest in supporting LifeStory in its present form. Even fewer numbers indicate thay might use it occassionally. This is nothing like the perceived demand that has been expressed by Ancestry management as the causation for this change.

Does it not make you wonder where they get this idea?

Any member who is curious for themselves…DO this.
Pick any four letters for a beginning member directory name to start a search thru the member rolls. Example choose “Dian” or “Diann” to begin searching the member directory for similar members names. To the far right as you scroll down see how many members show a long history of membership or how many have recently logged in. This technique reveals a very stunning fact, that while Ancestry can claim stunning numbers in registered membership, very few stay long or pursue very active participation on the site.
The take a few of these test cases and notice how many trees are shown as started with maybe a tree of less than 100 individuals and then virtually abandoned. This is another telling fact about the depth of most member’s activity is very short-lived.

Hi All what do any of you think about the ‘New’ Ancestry? I think it’s black background and the glaring pink and blue faces are truly awful? The new search facilities are good and the profile adding all the records of births of children etc fabulous. But please get rid of that truly awful black background – please

Let’s face it folks, the “new” Ancestry is here to stay, and FTM is gone like the wind. In spite of the thousands of comments on the blogs asking Ancestry to ‘listen’ and rescind these changes that they say were carefully researched, and requested by members, Ancestry will go forward with whatever they want to do. I have been a member for at least 15 years and started FTM long before Ancestry bought it out. NO ONE EVER CONTACTED ME FOR MY INPUT.
Everyone just bear in mind, ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’!

Now seeing how Ancestry management must think, they will take a decreasing number of negative comments about how bad new Ancestry is that they will think the storm has passed. They will however forget that the reason the numbers go down is because so many have left and just don’t care anymore….

This is unbelievable! I’ve been trying all day to sync my tree, and I keep getting error messages. Seems like half of their wonderful new Ancestry isn’t working right, at least for me anyhow. The decision to discontinue old system was stupid enough, but to force this new garbage upon us before it was even working properly was completely moronic.

My final comment on this garbage that is the new Ancestry. So glad my renewal was up JUST before the switch and that I was aware of that so I could cancel (and by the way, the way they keep your credit card information and force all customers into autorenew unless you remember to cancel, with just a single e-mail reminder, should not be allowed to my way of thinking). Vote with your pocketbooks and leave. To the few who like new Ancestry, fine, continue. But don’t criticize those who don’t like it and want a forum to explain what they don’t like. Ancestry.com is a very expensive commodity and if it no longer meets the needs of a LARGE number of paying customers, they are well within their rights to express that (even though it seems the comments fall on deaf ears). I have not read one negative comment that was just negative for negative’s sake; every one had very sound reasoning.
However, this whole debacle has also made me realize how DUMB ancestry.com can be and how frustrating to use (both old and new).
With all the fuss over a new website, can anyone explain why the programmers can’t just give us
1) the option to set minimum and maximum dates for search results. I am SICK to death of being shown 1910 US census results for someone who lived and died in the 17thcentury. I can mark a date exact or exact plus or minus 10 years – but when a date is unknown how does that help (and even then I don’t think it stops the spurious results). A simple option to return dates no earlier than…or no later than… should be an extremely simple option to offer.
2) Why on earth can’t the programmers give us some way to sort out (and not display) the far-too-numerous and stupid “member photos” of fake family crests and immigrant ships, which like cream are always at the top of search results even though they are meaningless and less than useful. A generic picture may be useful to a specific individual on their tree but has little to no value to anyone else doing a search.
3) Don’t even get me started on what ancestry.com considers a “historic record” (in so many cases, NOT!).
Personally my biggest genealogical breakthrough came before I was an ancestry.com subscriber and one that I would NEVER in a million years have made had I been an ancestry.com member at the time. More and more I think ancestry.com has become a crutch because it had been (until the new website!) an easy place to go to; however, that same crutch is probably keeping us all from making new discoveries that we would find outside ancestry.com.
May I recommend to people, at least those with New England ancestry, the americanancestors.org website for actual research? It is not a place to keep a family tree but I have been very pleased with the quality of information there and the fact it is for thinking people and not dumbed down to the lowest-common-denominator (like guess which website seems to be?). Access to records that are not on ancestry.com and access to so many articles from numerous genealogical publications that far surpass in accuracy and value most of what ancestry.com has delivered to me.
Finally, in the past I have made NUMEROUS corrections to lousy indexing. All the time I thought that ancestry.com is taking advantage of its subscribers by letting us fix their indexing errors and do this work not just for free, but we do the work AND get to pay to do so. I made corrections anyway because I wanted to help other people find the records they sought. If I WERE a current subscriber, correcting mistakes would no longer be on my list of things to do (oh, and by the way, numerous mistakes made by ancestry can’t even be corrected when you discover them, such as an entire town being listed under the wrong name by Ancestry.com – hint, there is no “Troudale” in Missouri, the town is Irondale you complete and total idiots).

Now, to put something in here that IS really needed. At one point, several years ago, before the current ownership took over, the past owners were doing a wonderful job of RE SCANNING ALL THE CENSUS RECORDS, so we can all read them clearly, and add in to our tree appropriately. That was never finished. I am still finding Census records that I can’t read. Please continue with that process, after the site returns to “old ancestry”. Thank you.
I have also had to make corrections to the translations of Census records. I know at one point workers at ancestry were being paid by the number of clicks we customers had to click. Not sure if this is still the case but it sure seems suspicious that the site went from being very workable to one where you have to click several times just to get to something that before needed only one click. I feel VERY sorry for those working for ancestry (not in management), that have had to endure all the upset made by this latest change. Hopefully sanity will prevail in the end. If nothing else, we now have a fresh contrast to what we REALLY like. I was just thinking, if the site doesn’t go back soon to the way it was, some other company will simply COPY the way it was set up and take on all the new customers… There is a reason serious genealogists come to this site. There has been a great deal of thought that has gone in to how it currently looked. It didn’t happen by mere chance.

I have often found for Census that you cannot read on ancestry that FHL often has a better copy–doesn’t work for all as some Census data was involved in a flood of some type–broken water main, who knows BUT FHL very often has better copies than ancestry…

I had to go to FHL to be able to read a NY State Census that was very important–it was totally illegible on ancestry–and even though the FHL copy was not great it was good enough for me to read the county of birth info which was what I needed–so NOW if a Census copy is bad I always go find it on familysearch–MOST the time it is a lot more legible —you will find also that the transcriptions can be different on FHL than they are on ancestry–which sometimes helps clear up questions

Sorry, but no. No, no, no. This clunky, slow, cluttered, non-intuitive ‘new’ Ancestry should be unceremoniously dumped. What on Earth in your ‘extensive’ research pointed to users’ desire that you to replace the previous clean and relatively easy-to-figure-out format with this mess? My guess is that there is nobody at all in the company’s management who knows even the first thing about genealogy, genealogists, or user experience in this environment – Primeria’s handling of everything proves conclusively that there’s nothing going on here but a pump-and-dump effort to wring what profits can be had from a formerly well-regarded, specialty enterprise before unloading it. Very sad – and all too typical in the rapacious global economic reality we’re all now shoe-horned into. Our only hope is that someone, somewhere (LDS, are you listening? You alone may have the know-how and resources to combat this.) will see an opening for an alternative, and Ancestry will no longer be able to carry on with impunity. I will be ending my relationship with them as soon as I can get my tree offloaded in its entirety to my home computer. What a terrible shame.

Here’s another thing I just noticed. There was a wonderful addition to the OLD ANCESTRY that has been totally taken out. The function whereby you can see how you relate to anyone in the entire tree you’ve created. That is totally gone now. What is the point of having a family tree if you don’t know how you are connected to others in the tree?

BTW I recently realized that the ENTIRE databse of New England marriages before 1700 (Torrey) was improperly transcribed because the people transcribing did not read the instructions in his book before transcribing….I sent this info to ancestry and explained to them WITH copies of the page to instructions and links that they will need a specially instructed team to totally go back and re-transcribe ALL those records (which are almost 80 thousand records)

Do you think THAT will ever get done? Probably not—

I would estimate that 25-50% of directories are also incorrectly transcribed (usually addresses) —They apparently outsourced that to folks who don’t understand English as some of the simplest things are wrong…

If you cannot properly transcribe a TYPED record there is a problem…I have read they outsourced a lot of that either to China or Philipines–and in the more recent ones they even included the OLD style phone numbers as part of the address…

I have reported these issues to ancestry–but I doubt THAT will ever get done either

They COULD have spent the money they wasted on NEW to get these records fixed…but they didn’t–

JUST as WE had to Beta test NEW ANCESTRY-they expect US to find these mistakes one person at a time and correct them.

There is ONE problem with that –MOST people don’t bother to send in corrections and another problem is that unless someone is reasearching someone the errors will never be found–which is a double edged sword –eso when it comes to last names–if they mess that up (as they often do–but not nearly as often as the addresses) people won’t be able to find them to correct.

You ALSO cannot pull up directories by the YEAR…and the directories on a search come up with the most recent first…

Many times I have had to go to other resources to find directories from other sites that at least have the sense to be able to search them year by year…

I am SURE there are directories for some of my people that I will never be able to attach through ancestry…

You cannot pull them up by year…a BIG flaw in their searching–and YES I have tried putting them in as “extra data” to look for in the directory search and it does not work…

TONS of info we are missing out on that is simply because of the way searching is done—I SHOULD be able to pull up NYC directories any year there is a copy of—for some family they pop up–for others they don’t BUT I know they are there because I see them on the page.

SO I do it the hard way and copy a “photo” of the directory, add manually as an address and year under facts–

BUT I SHOULD be able to pull up any directory by year and persons name…but I can’t.

SOME may think this is no big deal, but when you are looking for Stephenson in NYC it is as sometimes the only SURE connection we can make is to find people living at the same address or near each other.

I find SO many issues, I report them via email…I correct things when I find them (often even if not my family) BUT ancestry is expecting US to fix all their records and it is #1 not our job #2 it leaves a LOT of records that go uncorrected simply because nobody is looking for that person–yet–

I could scream when I see the number of problems with their databases and TOTAL database corrections that need to be done…YET

They wasted all this money on NEW when they SHOULD have been fixing all these database and search problems

BTW – I can’t help noticing the occasional glowing review interspersed among the many complaints; as a language professional, I notice that most of these sunny positives read suspiciously like they were planted by Ancestry staff. Boy, if that’s the case, you guys really are kind of sad. Bush league, rank amateurs. You may want to reconsider your apparent opinion that we’re all a pack of rubes who would be so much cooler if we’d just get a better hobby….

Hi, the new website is not good. The first thing I noticed was the the “pink” female box designing female covers up the first letters of the person’s name. Really!!!? You can’t do better than this. Amazing from there it went downhill. Bring back the old version until the new version is cleaned up.

I have been trying to keep up with all the posts on this blog but when the numbers get high, I have to read it in spurts. Since they have no numbers like they did years ago, I put a piece of tape on the side of my monitor to mark my place. I wish we could “reply” to the posts because when I want to send a message to one of the posters or make a suggestion or comment, it has to go at the end of the blog. I’m not sure everyone reads the whole thing. It can be a bit tedious.

What I have read about folks losing their data or it being changed mysteriously is a little bit scary. I don’t think people are lying but so far I have not lost anything or have had anything changed, that I can tell. I have not reviewed every person. I’m only working on my mother’s tree at this time.

I keep checking Life Story and I think it is changing! If you can believe that! Maybe someone at Ancestry is modifying the “canned” story. Some of my dates show “about” as I entered them. So I’m not having that problem mentioned above. However I’ll probably never use Life Story because of the uniqueness of my ancestor’s stories. Actually I wish I could turn it off.

I’m a minimalist in my use of Ancestry. Records are my main goal here. The rest is off line. I think all the tools I use are in the new version but the display is extremely busy and the colors ugly. Anything purple is the worst. The lines to the sources are ridiculous, not needed and generally a pain in the you know what. Ditto the purple boxes. Text sizes go from tiny-teeny to huge. I’d make the tiny just a little bit bigger and the huge smaller. After all, how many times are you going to read/use the name in the header while you are researching that person? Most people can remember who they are working on at a time.

The whole thing is just too busy but I’m trying to block out the extraneous stuff in my mind. It’s not easy sometimes.

A change made, before New was rolled out, creates havoc in my tree, because New highlights this erroneous change in the LifeStory. Ancestry has inexplicably changed the place name for St Louis (Independent City) to St Louis (Independent Cities) sometime in the past year, before June. I refuse to use this 100% incorrect place name in my tree. There are NO other options in the drop-down menu for St Louis City. The correct spelling has been tossed out, along with a dozen other place names within St Louis County. Is there a New York Cities? No. Neither is there a St Louis Cities! This error prevents me (and others) from garnering full search results for the City! Until Ancestry corrects this geographical moronic spelling, MYSELF and all St Louis relatives are in an Ancestry limbo! You are holding my City hostage from true and accurate documentation! I have been pleading for this correction since June. As a World class Genealogy site, it is absurd that someone in your employ made this very uneducated modification.

Has anyone noticed the FIND A PERSON IN THIS TREE can only search by first and last names now – no middle names allowed, unless the first goes with it – and correctly at that. The old FIND A PERSON could search by middle and last name only. That, however, changed in the preceeding weeks before the coming of the new Ancestry.

Long time customer here. I have been tolerating “new” Ancestry for several months – hating every minute of it, mind you. However, while working on my tree during the last 2 days, I have noticed that (more than usual) relationships (if they appear at all) are ridiculously garbled and I am suddenly seeing duplicate and triplicate hints hints. Barely tolerable until the changeover; now I have a feeling the train wreck is imminent!

Day Two of the Descent into Hell. I cannot express how much I detest the “new” Ancestry. I was going to stick it out until my subscription ended in February; however, two day of trying to slog my way through the slop you’ve forced us to use and I have given up. There’s no way I will try any more to use this site except to download my tree and DNA data and leave. If you think people are going to “get used to” this crappy design, you are so wrong. Good Bye.

I especially despise the Lifestory option on the pages for each person in my family trees. I would like to eliminate that option entirely for all those I have entered in my family trees. If I had wanted all that added info for a person, I would have added it to his/her page myself.

I cannot access my gallery under each individual. It just keeps spinning. Does anybody else have this issue. I have been using the new Ancestry for a few months but this just happened. I too wish we could go back to the old version.

I notice that most of the text of a response from a person named Alison at Ancestry.com to a complaint I made about Ancestry.com through the Provo, UT Better Business Bureau was lifted from this blog by Kendall Hulet. When I read the message from Alison, it came across to me as mostly boiler plate and a bit condescending. Now, I know it was a boiler plate reply. It just underlines my continued negative feelings about the company with this new Ancestry version.

Now that the “new” (notice Ancestry never says “new and improved”) site is foisted on us permanently, I will add another complaint on the long list of complaints and suggestions I’ve made previously. Restore the functionality of of quickly determining the relationship of the current person to the home person in the tree. If it’s buried somewhere, goodness knows where it is now…

I have a number of friends who belong to LDS church. I asked them about the changes. For those who either have accounts or talked with friends, they are not happy with the changes. So apparently the copious amount of research paying close attention to customer’s wishes does not really include the LDS church.

I suppose that’s one audience that might actually have some real impact on the Ancestry BoD if they chose to speak up as a group.

Hello all – Go to change.org …in the search box type in ancestry.com – There is a petition to bring back old ancestry and there is a petition to keep family tree maker. If you would like to join this petition, the option is there. It was already created by some other unhappy customer. You just have to add your name.

Gee, it’s a choice to stay or not, I like some things, some I dont. But I will stay, I’ve tried others, this on still tops everyone else for access…sorry so many are unhappy, but you do have a choice…good luck..

Ancestry needs to fix the Find Person boxes on Tree Pages. Now even those have to be clicked open before a person’s name can be entered. Stop making searches more difficult. Why do I fell like I’m clicking my life away?

Is there a central place for folks to discuss, in depth, the alternative software and databases? I know we can’t discuss here, besides Ancestry not allowing it, admittedly it would be pretty rude. But, I do have questions about Rootsmagic, and the experiences people have with other database companies. My subscription to Ancestry has been cancelled, my trees are all private/non-searchable, and fortunately I synched FTM a week or so ago so my tree is in good shape in so far as not losing info. I’ve always downloaded records to my computer because it just seemed the safest way to curate them and besides, if I want to print out a copy at 3 am, I don’t necessarily want to spend the time online to find and print. Anyway, is there a listserv or somesuch for folks interested in comparing info and swapping help for software and databases?

Trying to work with the new Ancestry layout is a lot more tedious, and it’s so much harder to keep track of what I’m doing without the group sheets. Usually I enjoy working on family history, but today hasn’t been enjoyable. Ancestry, please add family group sheets.

I cannot see where the new ancestry is an improvement over the old one in any way. My current problem is how does one save a document from one family member to another if that person does not appear in the pull down list to save it to. I have thousands on my tree with many names in common. There is no way to access the entire list in the new format to attach to. Does anyone know how this can now be done?

You can get rid of the purple lines and boxes once they appear by clicking on the “offending” purple box again. Trouble is, by the time I’m hit in the face with them and stop to remove them, I lose track of what I was doing.

You can also stop the “crawly” page by never allowing your cursor to cross a fact or source block until needed. It is difficult, however, to keep your cursor always in the periphery.

A two-column work page (put the sources back under family members) – without the “crawly” and the pop-up purple – would do much, even with it’s other faults, to enhance the tree building “experience” once again. I intend to ask for this over and over again via a the familiar link that I am told does go directly to the developers: support@ancestry.com>

Hi all, I’ve read and agree with the general comments here. I tried to post a comment this afternoon, but for some reason it didn’t get past the moderators, even though my comment was not abusive and was on-point. I did include a link showing that traffic to the Ancestry site has been dropping steadily since October. Maybe that’s what got me filtered “out.” So (if this one makes it past the censors), know that there are more unhappy comments “out there” that don’t even get posted.

Why are you not listening to us?!! More people hate it than like it! It’s not that it just takes time to learn something new. We are not stupid! It’s a lousy format in every way! Plus, it continually keeps dropping and reloading pages! I cannot see myself staying with this mess if some drastic changes don’t take place before my renewal! Why could we not keep the option of staying with the old format? Why on Earth did you take that away from us? You certainly don’t seem like you are interested in making your subscribers happy, that’s for sure!

I am giving you a thumbs down for this new look you have now forced on us.
I have tried to work on my ancestors page and my first thought is that it is flat. The coloration is awful and even more so for those with certain eye issues. Faint colors are not an older person friend. So, suggestion 1 please provide more contrast and ditch the monotones.
Suggestion 2. The Edit button is too far distant from the person that needs editing. It needs to be central to that person. I had to go looking for it today so that I could edit my ancestors name. A simple and quick process in the old Ancestry now takes too much time and energy to deal with.
Suggestion 3. The facts column and the source column have no relevance to one another. The facts column is an event by date. To find the corresponding source one has to scroll through the entire list of sources. Allow the source to be added to the fact box as it was in the Old Ancestry. Or, if this is too much to offer your customer base then organize the sources by date with the fact that they are attached to. If there is a birth record then it should come first in the source column followed by the other sources. It makes no sense that a birth source is found in the middle of the source column or at the bottom. The death source needs to at the bottom.
The lack of color on the person page is off putting. The text all runs together. It is so off putting and unenjoyable to be on this page. There should be, at least, something to between the three generations showing. Some more color is necessary.
Suggestion 4. The galler page should be under the person of interest. Why do we have to go to an entirely different screen to see the gallery. There is plenty of space on the person page to have the photographs there.
You have taken what was a streamlined set up and made it more difficult to work in. You have flattened out the colors and reduced the contrast. You have made it less enjoyable to work on a person page.
So, here is what may happen in my case.
If I do not see some improvement or more documents coming my way, I will remove all my trees and basically quit Ancestry. My eyes are old eyes and tire easily. Your new ancestry furthers the process and if I cannot stand to view the pages for any length of time why bother to even be a member. I can take my money and move elsewhere. Find my Past is continually getting better. This is an alternative.
As for your DNA section, I am gradually figuring this out and finding I don’t like many aspects of it.
I don’t like the fact that you limit the searches to the closer matches and not to the further matches. Imagine my surprise when I was looking at a distant match and found a family member, plain as day. Their names should have come up in my searches but did not. So, you need to stop playing games with you customer base and begin to listen to them. If there is a search box offered for trying to locate family names then ALL names need to appear not just the closer matches. And, I find it strange that the farther out returns do not have any shared matches. I think you are, again, cutting off all those more distant matches. I want to see those surnames of interest come up in my search and I want to be able know if we have shared matches. You have arbitrarily declared that a known family member and I have no shared matches. This is absolutely WRONG and I want to have search access to all my matches no matter how far out they fall.
Based on the above, I cannot recommend Ancestry to any of my family or friends that want to have their DNA tested. I am referring them to FTDNA. And, I am recommending that those who have tested transfer their raw data to FTDNA and to Gedmatch. Too bad. I had high hopes for AncestryDNA.

Unfortunately my account is paid up until next November. On the bright side that gives me almost a year for Ancestry to get their act together and bring back the old Ancestry before I cancel my account. I used to love ancestry, now I detest it. Out with new and in with the old! Myheritage is looking pretty good compared to the unmitigated crap being force feed to all of us formally loyal customers. An old adage in sales goes something like this: It takes years upon years to build a loyal customer base, but only minutes, hours or days to loose it all.

You’re killin’ me, Smalls. I am not even someone who is resistant to change–I have praised Ancestry for many positive changes, such as improvement in content. This change includes so much dumbing-down, loss of functionality and flat-out ugly design that I am ready to bail. I am at the point of not wanting my trees on the site at all (I am now a happy user of Legacy 8 which is everything FTM dreamed of being at a fraction of the price) but to only use Ancestry for searches. At this point I am thinking this might better be accomplished at the local library than with a subscription. I have a feeling the decisions made by Ancestry this year will be textbook examples of what-not-to-do in business and marketing. Right next to “New Coke.”

“Over a year ago, based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs, we set out to build a better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story.”
This means “It wasn’t broken, but that didn’t stop us from trying to fix it for you.”

Just sent this message to the developers, calling for a work page. Am encourging others to do the same. support@ancestry.com>

“Am so sorry to keep saying so, but after many tries, your page gets no easier to view nor to use. Real researchers need a simpler, cleaner page from which to do work.

Functional clicks should be kept to a minimum on a two-column page. The sudden appearance of “edit” and purple lines and backdrop detract from the work mindset. We are too busy trying to escape those elements to care about doing real work.”

I am all for progress and improvement but The previously excellent Ancestry website is now ruined and no longer fit for purpose. I have cancelled my 10 year membership and I would be interested to know how many other previously loyal subscribers (outside of the USA) will be joining me in the coming weeks.

I have so much enjoyed using ancestry for about six years. I have built an incredible family tree that includes many historically significant relatives. The new ancestry is bulky and cumbersome and I truly dislike how my history has been altered by your addition of erroneous info. Please give us the option to use old ancestry. My membership expires the end of March 2016. By then I should have all my info downloaded or transferred to a new service. I don’t like your service as it now stands and I will cancel my membership once I have secured my records elsewhere. As many have already suggested, why didn’t you grandfather in the old ancestry website for those who prefer it? You offered both the old and the new format for the last few months so obviously you could have continued to do so.

It is very interesting to read the postings on this blog by serious people, they cover most of my comments so no need to repeat. I have been a member since 2001 and cancelled my subscription this month and made my tree private (a small form of protest). Having said that, posters should not surprised by the business processes of this company. When Ancestry was a public company, numerous stock analysts who covered the company concluded the Executive Team was detached from the consumer and they rated their software developments as a average “C” company. (In my view they are an “A” company for cataloging content) Nonetheless, they are a company and deserve to make a profit. Their method to sustain revenue growth has been to pander to the lowest common denominator, the Holiday Genealogist that purchases a subscription and expects to “Shaky Leaf” their way to a 10 generation chart in a few hours complete with photos! I shall part on good terms as the company has previously delivered the value for my subscription cost. Good Luck on your future endeavours!

Why are you surprised people are complaining? When people have spent 1000s of dollars and hours on creating their family tree and you go in and no longer support their desktop software and mess with their online tree at the same time with buggy unneeded changes, they are not going to be happy about it. You better figure out how to continually get new customers because you have lost a sizable portion of your repeat business. You have lost their trust and there is more and more competition out there. They aren’t as big or as convenient, but they listen and they haven’t messed up our data. The result of our research is what we care about and we do not trust you to keep it safe any more, so we are leaving, we are yelling because we really don’t want to go, but we are afraid for the future of our research so we have to leave to protect it.

As angry as I am about the changes and most specifically about the invasion of my tree by Ancestry, I still recommend Ancestry DNA, but only if you plan to upload to GEDmatch; and I have tested at all 3 big companies. To immediately see the trees of your dna matches with having to reinvent the wheel is invaluable. Of course, to prove the tree matches, you have to do segment matching at GEDmatch. A tree match is not a dna match without proving it.

My comments echo those of many others. I moved to ‘new’ Ancestry several months ago when it looked like the ‘old’ Ancestry would go away. I was right — the ‘old’ Ancestry is gone. I, too, do not like the new look. Scrolling down through the multitude of date when each child was born, married and died does not help my research. I can review that information by clicking on the child’s name. From another person: “the layout is not intuitive nor helpful, search layout and functions are not equal or better than the previous setup.”
Also, from others — stop whining. If you don’t like it, then leave. I haven’t decided yet what I will do about my family trees — I have 8 trees posted — one for each parent and parent-in-law, two trees with other relatives, an extended family tree for one branch with difficult relationships (to avoid cluttering up a direct line tree), and a tree for an suspected ancestor (who proved to not be my direct ancestor but may still be related to on my dad’s side). The last tree was created mainly to provide info to people who keep using previously published misinformation about the lineage. Not sure how much impact this has had because I still frequently see the misinformation. Yes, I contact those tree owners to correct their own trees.
Ancestry provides a powerful research tool but there are limitations. Tree view says there are hints but when I go to hints page — nothing.
Ancestry does not provide many features of a desktop-based software program. For the moment, my trees remain linked to Family Tree Maker as I transfer to another software program. When that process is complete — I haven’t decided yet what I will do about online trees. Given issues surrounding who ‘owns’ my data & media, I will not add any personally held pictures, documents, etc. to online trees. I will make notes such as ‘Date from personal copy of family Bible’ but will not post image of the family Bible.

You guys in the office have nothing better to do than screw up a perfectly good platform. YOU COULD HAVE USED THE MONEY TO BUY A “WATSON” TYPE OF SEARCH ENGINE. That would have boosted subscribers by a third. “Classic” ancestry will be restored, in time. When it does, I’ll renew my subscription. Till then, I’m moving on.

Well done Kendall Hulet – in the space of three days you have scrapped nearly £100k pa of income if all the subscribers above cancel their subscriptions. Do you think it’s time to start listening to the feedback?

I have just checked out approximately 25 “suggested records” that appear in the right column when viewing the transcription view for a known, already-selected, census for an individual in my tree. Accustomed to several matches always coming up in this process, absolutely 0 matches came up among about 25 “suggested records”. Even the already established census records for this man failed to show.

What has happened? This was the way in which I so rapidly built my tree under the Old Ancestry. This renders the search and work process now essentially ineffective.

Could it be that so many trees have gone not only private, but unsearchable, that legitimate suggestions no longer appear?

I wonder if others are encountering the same ridiculous “suggested records” that now come up? I know for months we have all experienced the almost total uselessness of searching for records from the top toolbar. This long ago became mush from “Maine to California”. For some time now, I have used Family Search for such searches. Once I entered the found data in my tree, Ancestry would then give me the same record in a hint that I COULD add to my tree.

The loss of the “suggested records” benefit just adds to the litany of concerns that anyone should have about Ancestry, whether you like the new or the Old. Those who have depended upon its function know its great loss. Those who are newly snared by Ancestry will never know its immediate benefit and will lose interest even more quickly.

It’s all about the bottom line and profit making. Ancestry is no longer a company interested in genealogy. And, clearly they are not interested in doing the right thing. We all teach our kids to admit a mistake, correct it and apologize. Well Ancestry – when will you admit you screwed up? Oh, right. That will never happen. Idiots.

Dear Ancestry management team: Apparently your strategy towards all the complaints you’ve received about New Ancestry is: “Talk to the hand.” Well, if you are so proud of New Ancestry, why did I see one of Ancestry’s commercials on a television last night using screen shots of Classic Ancestry? Instead of your talk-to-the-hand response to complaints, perhaps you should hold a staff meeting to let the right hand know what the left hand is doing. Bait and switch? Perhaps. More likely an incompetent roll out of an inferior product.

I feel at this time I must write a comment. So much has been negative and I was one of those people that fought the change of the new ancestry appearance and function. I fought until the end by not using it, why because as soon as I went on it, I couldn’t stand the color, it was too dark, so I clicked back to the comfortable appearance. So on the 15th I was forced to use the new. I was in the process of merging 2 trees as I am doing more DNA testing with other family members. My new tree that I uploaded to ancestry is over 84,000 people. I had no trouble uploading and syncing. I am a long time member and have been doing research for years the old fashion way. I tell the younger generation that they have it easy and it is the lazy persons way if they just click and save. You need to compare, analyze, etc. and you cannot do that by phone. I use multiple sites for source material. But always come back to FTM to enter my data. It was great the year sync became available in FTM as it is tedious to keep an online tree and a tree on your hard drive in sync. You just don’t keep two trees in two locations if you cannot sync! I will truly miss the sync capability and would suggest you keeping that function available to all who use it. The DNA testing has led to my son-in-law working to find his mother’s parents as she was adopted. By having his siblings tested, has proven he is on the right path to searching her ancestors. I am teaching my son-in-law the right way to do research and he understands the process. It is exciting to see new improvements being developed and amazing to see what lies ahead. I will stay right here for now, lets all give ancestry a chance to hear us out. I am sure they will respond, any human being would do that!
Please re-think all your negativity and dislike to the person who had to make this announcement. Put yourself in his shoes, how is he feeling right now?

Lucky for me, my renewal date is next week. Yesterday I off-loaded my GEDCOM and Media to FTM, then transferred them to a new Desktop app. I am learning about a lot of great features and reports that I never had access to on ancestry.

This morning, about five minutes ago, I cancelled my renewal. (Sometimes change is good)

As for “rethinking my negativity,” as suggested above, I just discovered that more is screwed up than I had so far realized. My known and potential DNA matches are disappearing as disgruntled customers remove their trees. So, it appear to me that Mr Hulet has ALSO sabotaged our DNA match results. Nice going, Ancestry. Really thought this through, didn’t you?

The ugly dark site is back after one day of , what I thought was the newer version. Hopefully it is off due to bug fixes, since the icons would not load, but it was a beautiful interface, and not the dark grey blob I am now viewing?

I have multiple trees. When I save a census to a person, it used to show that that census was saved to someone on another tree. This showed quickly the connection between families and allowed a quick move to other trees. Not any more. This is a real loss. Plus wasted time going to a drop down to find features that used to be immediately visible on profile pages.

How much will Ancestry charge to maintain the online trees that I have synced?
I’d be happy to sign up with RootsMagic for $20, if they let me connect to Ancestry’s databases, use the “shaky leaf” concept, let me use the FTM procedure for sourcing my facts, let me sync with Ancestry, let me use the Ancestry DNA results, etc.
Will Ancestry allow RootsMagic to provide all of these features that are so desirable on FTM?

I don’t mind the New Ancestry at all. I noticed some contrast improvements yesterday and they are great! I don’t have any of the media problems described. The only thing I’d like to add today is regarding the mobile app. I can’t imagine anyone doing serious research on a cell phone or tablet. I tried the app and found it to be too difficult to use for my large tree. (I am an advanced user so it’s not that.) While I realize that having an app is useful to some, I hope you do not continue to put most of your efforts/resources into that. My main complaint is about discontinuing FTM. It’s a great complement to Ancestry.com. I do most of my research on the website and clean-up, maintenance with the software. I’d be happy to pay a small subscription fee for cloud based software that has the tools (de-dup, data errors, kinship reports, etc.) now available only on FTM. Please consider this.

Please correct the search menu location of St Louis (Independent Cities) to properly read St Louis (Independent City). I was not born in St Louis Cities, but rather St Louis City. There is no such place, in the entire Universe, named St Louis Cities. The powers-that-be made an inexcusable error in directing I.T. to change that location name from ‘City’ to ‘Cities’.

To further explain that request, the CITY of St Louis is a City on its own, thus “Independent”. It is NOT within the County, and was separated from St Louis County almost 140 years ago, in 1876. PLEASE correct the error.

AncestryDNA. I just went to check and 5 groups of DNA circles are now gone. Just what I thought would happen if these changes became permanent. That means at least 50 people, more or less, have totally taken their trees off ancestry.com, but evidently this doesn’t matter to management as the “new ancestry” (which is actually a re-hash of a very early version of ancestry.com) is still here.
Again, I need to let people know that have not been here very long, these “new” color schemes on the site now have been tried before. At one point in ancestry.com’s history there was a function where you could yourself modify the color scheme to 5 different color combinations. That is how we came to the colors that were kept as the standard. It is the color combination most chosen by the most customers. It wasn’t an accident that the light tan and light green were used. Management then noticed that fewer people did their trees that had the very dark colors than the ones who had lighter colors. We aren’t here for contrast, we are here for genealogy. The high contrast is VERY hard on the eyes. Those that do a great deal of research know that.

Having been a member of Ancestry since 2002, I have been through several changes to your formatting, most of which have advanced the use and enjoyment of your site. However, this ‘NEW’ Ancestry format is a disaster. The ‘LifeStory’ is mind-numbing, repetitive and juvenile. It’s basically ‘fill in the blank’. And to actually print this story for one of my ancestors your ‘Printer Friendly’ option took 5 sheets of paper. The number of words in this ‘story’ was 275. Some of the print was in 18 pt font and the rest in 16 pt. This is ‘Printer-Friendly’?? As a comparison, I have a printer friendly copy of a person’s fact page printed in 2003, which included all facts about parents and siblings, including dates and locations of birth and marriage. This was somehow all printed on 1 page! According to http://www.wordstopages.com/ 275 words printed double spaced at Arial 12 pt would take only 1 page. Please address this printing issue!

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Bait and switch–the action of advertising goods with the intention of substituting inferior or more expensive goods.
In the case of Ancestry, our subscriptions have been substituted with an inferior product. I for one find it tiresome to hear the shills telling us that we should embrace the new technology. What is new here? That hideous blue and pink can be found in the “Dick and Jane” books from the 1930s. And the black bars are nothing short of distracting. Even with my monitor set at 90% the visuals are dizzying and an embarrassment to “professional” graphic designers. I have no problem with technological changes, I have a problem with mediocrity.
The shills tell us that we “have to adjust to change.” Not quite, when I pay $300 a year for the “privilege” of researching my 48,000 individuals and then making them available to Ancestry to tout in their “shaking leaf” commercials. Ancestry would have made more profit it they had charged long-time researchers by the hour. For over a decade, I have spent countless hours on a daily basis building my trees. That all changed months ago when a glitch threw me into their nighmarish beta. I reverted back, but I think we all knew the clock was ticking.
Members have asked for proof that Ancestry consulted anyone before making these carpal-tunnel and vomitous inducing changes. In all the blogs, I have yet to see anyone come forward to say they were part of the focus group or that they provided Ancestry a list asking for these cosmetic changes. What I do see is that Kendall Hulet is credited with “the Ancestry Family Tree system that has led to the creation of over 70 million family trees containing six billion ancestors.” Perhaps that is why he feels he has proprietary ownership over our work.
Over the years I have made my trees public so that others could avail themselves of the sources I found. Let’s face it, Ancestry’s credibility in the accuracy department leaves a lot to be desired. For years I have complained about their transcription errors in mistaking Arkansas for Arizona and Maine for Mexico. Obviously this was not as important in correcting as deciding between putrid pink and bile blue for the “New” Ancestry. Additionally, if an individual was born and died in Arizona, why am I provided with countless “matches” in Mexico, Nicaragua, and elsewhere? Any attempt to refine the search results in absolutely zero results. And although Ancestry regularly offers Newspapers.Com at a “discount” to subscribers, it seems that they are incapable of providing us with the obituaries that come up in a search without a “not found” error. And currently to add more insult, every search opens with a free trial offer taking up valuable space.
Most people commenting are long-time researchers who are greatly impacted by these unwarranted changes. The newbie who opens a trial tree for 30 seconds and then is gone leaving garbage behind could care less. So who are we? I am the one distracted from my own searches by the numerous inquiries I received daily when my tree was public. I along with many others were the “shaking leaves.” My research time, my uploaded photos, my acquired documents from outside sources, all were contributed to members on Ancestry. I am the one who stopped researching long enough to make the endless corrections. While we as members are valueless to Ancestry, our trees and the data they contain are the money makers. Convert your trees to private and that will impact their wallets. No shaking leaves, no new subscribers. More than likely, those ghost hints are a result of trees being deleted or going private.
Not sure how many have noticed that the thumbnail headstone photos on FindaGrave links in Ancestry are now gone. Is this because they violated copyright laws? Long before Ancestry came along to buy FindaGrave, volunteers were adamant that they did not want to see their photos on Ancestry. I never understood that until now. This free site was and is populated by all us volunteers who have walked the cemeteries and uploaded and posted relevant information. For Ancestry to try a similar move on FindaGrave would be disastrous, because contributors could bring down the site simply by deleting their memorials and building a new site. My paltry contributions to Findagrave do not in any way compare to the hundreds of thousands by some single contributors. But what I do contribute are the updates that link the families and provide vital dates for others memorials through my research. That too means nothing to Ancestry until we stop contributing.
None of the comments registered here will produce one iota of change with Ancestry. We can work in the “New” Ancestry, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. I like others will no longer make my research available in a public tree. I have converted them all and am no longer responding to inquiries asking for my help or asking to view my trees. Ancestry can generate whatever stories they want, but it takes a researcher to link and build a family. It takes experience to distinguish what is a match and what is not. It takes a researcher to know that Wadaloupe should be “Guadalupe.” My photos, my documents, and my research will now remain in Legacy where I have full control of the trees I build. If Ancestry wants to add stories to our trees then offer us Newspapers.com for free.

One commenter suggested firing the instigator of this “new” mess he has created. I don’t agree. I think he should be shot. Not that I would do that myself, I would prefer to rip out his heart with my bare hands but I realize he don’t have one. I have invested hundreds of dollars in building a family tree which I can’t even use and nobody gives a damn. I am glad I have a name now to assign this travesty to. I hope I run into him some day. If I don’t accomplish the task the first time I will turn around and run into him again for as long as it takes.

10:30pm Monday night – house not cleaned, cards not sent, gifts not wrapped, because I spent hours and hours and hours the past month or so first checking each and every name alphabetically for “comments” to copy into “notes. I then went through over 1000 “hints” a final GEDCOM. As I went through all these “hints”, it amazed me the number that come in for someone that has so little to do with that person, yet nothing came in for someone named Margie – until I change it to Marjorie, even when the name is not checked as “exact”. I am APPALLED at the errors I am seeing in transcription! Newton, Newfoundland for Newton Massachusetts? The misspelling of names is beyond ridiculous. I can’t believe English was the first language of the people doing the transcribing of these documents! In one case, the names were copied from a very legible PRINTED birth record, but had the names of the parents taken from the person above! How about Chestet for Chester? Only in this crazy “PC world” would someone named Mary Eleanor or Charles Edward be of “unknown” gender! Here is something from another one of those “LAST SIGNED IN OVER YEAR AGO” – perhaps abandoned tree? – “MOTHER – born 1928, DAUGHTER – born 1900”! Do you think they found anything? I finally realized I wouldn’t finish going through the last one hundred+ “hints”, so I looked at the list of names that was left and checked out the most pertinent. My reward was finding a third cousin of my mother’s.
So here we are with “NEW” ancestry – Could someone PLEASE tell me what purpose does that “timeline” with the purple line serve, since it just repeats what is in the long white box? Why not put the “age” into that LONG WHITE BOX?? This “VIEW” and “EDIT” popping up as I move my mouse over the profile page is making me SEASICK! Also, how annoying is that “record saved” that keeps popping up!! “SAME OLD, SAME OLD”: 12 people on the “hint” list, but it says “PEOPLE WITH HINTS” – 21! There is also a name with a “hint”, but there IS no “hint”!!! THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR OVER THREE YEARS!!!!!!!!!! HOW IN THE WORLD DO I GO BACK TO “List of names” after checking out a “hint”?????

Now that I have used the “New Ancestry” for a couple of days, I find it really does stink. Not only is it ugly with a terrible format, but it makes it harder to do things, adding extra steps or not recalling repeated entries. What use were any of these changes?

All you folks making your trees private are ONLY hurting your fellow researchers-you are not hurting ancestry at all as they STILL have the info you have put in your files—

I wish folks would realize making your trees private does not do anything to ancestry–it onlyl makes is harder for people related to you to get good info–

Ancestry HINTS are generated by what people have on their trees, and JUST cuz your tree is private does NOT mean the ancestry system is NOT using the info you have put into their database—

EVEN if you remove your trees, ancestry computers have already “seen” the info–you have already given it to them–so removing your trees, making them private is NOT hurting ancestry at all–it is JUST hurting your fellow researchers

I just signed the petition and sent the following with it:
“I cannot understand how a company can enact changes so extremely contrary to the needs and desires of their customers, especially when much if not most of their “product” is actually the work of those same customers. It is just incomprehensible. Never seen or heard of anything of this magnitude.
My five trees on Ancestry and Family Tree Maker were the result of hours and hours of “bucket list” work following surviving a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment and I resent more than I can ever express what you have done with them. Lest you think I’m some febrile old lady, yes, I’m retired, and yes, I’m no longer young, but I was a real estate agent, a technical trainer, a research analyst, an accident investigator and a customer service specialist before I retired. And I mastered the OLD Ancestry with precious little help from you, although I called frequently, with very mixed results.
Right now, I think the old ancestry is dead for good. I’ve made all my trees private and I’m exporting to both Legacy 8 and Roots Magic. Hopefully they will work well and will not be as obtuse as you are going forward. In the meantime I am biding my time with my monthly Ancestry membership on the very remote chance you will get a clue after your contributor activity and membership plummet. Frankly, I very much doubt that will happen.
Just got yet another of your almost daily emails trying to get me to bite on Ancestry DNA or World Wide Ancestry. Seriously?!”
Hopefully, that will reach someone who cares, but I doubt it. Before I go, I want to share the following. It’s completely true and I think I’ve finally figured out Ancestry’s true motivation in doing all of this.
One of my trees is a very small one for a dear family friend when I was growing up. She was an African American woman who was very well known nation-wide for the amazing contributions she made in African American and Women’s rights and Music in her 100 year long life. So on the morning of THE 15TH I went into her little tree first, to assess the damage. When I scrolled down her family story… and I’m not making this up…. Up comes a great big photo of Wyatt Earp! And the narrative says… “Legendary frontiersman Wyatt Earp may have come in contact with xxx while they were living in Texas,Texas, as Earp settled in several cities. “ Yep, exactly as quoted here, except I’ve taken my friend’s name out of it. Now I’m not sure where TEXAS,TEXAS is, but my friend didn’t live there, even if Wyatt Earp did. I even if she had, I’m pretty sure that she and Wyatt Earp never crossed paths.
When I saw this I literally burst out laughing. I mean I cannot even begin to tell you when or why I’ve done that in the last 10 or 15 years of my life. But I did, right here in my office with no one around to enjoy it with me. So… I’m pretty sure that I finally understand why Ancestry has done this… It’s for the humor. They obviously have taken on as a mission bringing some humor to the world. And in that, at least for a minute or two here at my house, they finally succeeded in something.
Merry Christmas Everyone

Yes I have made my tree private, until Ancestry make Life Story an feature than can be opted out from, that’s the way it will stay. As for information they are welcome to it as it was theirs in the first place. Any information I have gleaned from other sources is held on my PC only for two reasons, much of it is subject to copyright and thus uploading would be in breach of copyright. The other reason is I read Ancestry’s T&Cs and saw what they were allowed to do with user submitted information.

It is likely that I will eventually remove my tree from the site, once I have my own website up and running.

Joyce–In my decade long affiliation with Ancestry, not once did anyone provide me with my family tree. Every person I added came from my own research. What I did not find on Ancestry, came from church records, FamilySearch, chroniclingamerica.org, FindaGrave, NewspaperArchives, Arizona vital records, the Yuma Historical Society, local libraries, and the local Family History center. All this I provided to members who found it easier to lift the information rather than search for it. If I can find, they can find it.
I did have a public tree, and that meant constantly fielding questions and responding to the best of my ability. It was not enough that I had already researched and posted, they all wanted additional information. Nobody paid me for my time despite the fact that I too was a subscriber.
It does absolutely no good if there is only one source because everyone is accepting the research from one tree. What we need are other people researching in the same areas so that there is a comparison. If one person misses something, then maybe someone else will add to the history. I did meet several phenomenal people on Ancestry who also greatly aided me in my research. But we produced separate trees and this made a great difference in furthering our histories and fixing missteps.
“Researchers” will not be hurt by my conversion to a private tree. It is only those not doing the research, or those looking for instant families who will be impacted. Maybe if they have to do the work and spend the time, then will they understand why the “New” Ancestry has made it more difficult to produce those trees you think should be available publically. It’s not personal, it is the principle.

I, too, wonder who you consulted before making the changes. Having once worked as a computer programmer, I understand that most software “improvements” are made for the convenience of the programmers or to show other programmers how beautifully one can code something complex.
In other words, your “improvements” stink.

Ok, it says in the help section, there is a button next to FACTS, so one can get rid of all the junk (every childs birth ,etc.) Sorry, I don’t have one. !!!!!! I don’t want anything except the good OLD ancestry back. You allowed us to use the old and new at one time, so, why cant it be continued. Waiting for a REPLY?????

Donna Goodwin – I agree whole heartedly with you – bring back good OLD ancestry – I have commented a couple of days ago and my feelings have not changed in the slightest. The new is not a patch on the old and I feel extremely frustrated with it. I have been printing off profile pages of people in my tree when time and money (ink) has allowed. This has gone from a decent looking page to cheap looking and takes more ink and paper.

“Wyatt Earp” Kathie, that’s funny…in an are you serious, Ancestry, way 😀 Oh, but you can just ignore and no one will see that Historical Insight. Uhhhm, yeah. …..if I hear that one more time, I pity whatever is in my way at that moment.

@Donna Goodwin. To turn off Family Events (births and deaths of children, etc.) and the Historical Highlights (Ancestry-inserted photos in Life Story), you must work from the FACTS page.

Under the line that displays LIFE STORY – FACTS – GALLERY – HINTS, look just below the words Life Story and Facts. You will see two buttons: SHOW and ADD.

Click on SHOW. The options to turn off both FAMILY EVENTS and HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHTS will appear in a dropdown list. You choices will be reflectd on both the Life Story page and the Facts page. You can turn them back on the same way.

I am told this not only helps your view, but in others’ view of you tree as well. Does anyone know that for sure? A guest who has been invited to my tree says she still sees the Family Events, but not the Historical Highlight. Could just be a glitch.

New Ancestry is horrible…The New color scheme hurts your eyes..It’s cluttered,not user friendly…I’ve belonged to Ancestry since 2001…never had any complaints til now………..What the hell were you thinking……were not here for pretty were here researching…….I’m forever clicking to find things….You ruined my enjoyment on Ancestry can research for a few minutes before I get a headache and mad….If it doesn’t change for the better it’s not worth paying for it…Oh I have the right to Whine……I’ve paid a lot of money to you people….

Message to Developers: Comments are a crucial tool in online genealogy. We need to leave messages for others and they may know something we would like to know. To miss comments of either is losing a wonderful tool for online research.

Thank you for keeping COMMENTS. We need to know, at a glance, however, that they are there. With all the other elements going on, most will not take time – or will forget – to OPEN the COMMENTS button to SEE if comments are there.

A simple (1), (2), (3) etc. following the COMMENT button found at the top of the FACTS page would serve as an ALERT to view the comment.

Elhura- P.S.: Works great for Family Events. Does not seem to work for the pictures they have added to the LifeStories. They are still there even after I remove the check mark. So I am removing them one by one. But how nice that I do not have to see the Family Events anymore.

@Elhura, TKU, I did that and I don’t have the ability to do so. I used ancestry’s HELP (joke) section and they show the same step by step (with pictures) procedure. I get no pop ups, nothing. I can NOT add a fact either. It just sits and stares at me. Does anyone actually think our comments are being looked at? How about you Jessica Murray????????

Rather than reiterate all the comments to which I agree, I must add one of the “FUNNY” errors in LIFE STORY. It seems a s if my paternal grandfather, fathered my Dad, when my MGF was only 1 year old. There is an edit button but too many errors to use it…almost like doing your whole tree from scratch to make all the corrections. I too after decades of FTM and Ancestry have one foot out the door. Maybe with all the negative comments someone will wake up in their “ivory tower” and take heed. Dream on, Joanie. Hmmm, just noticed that comments are open only until March 13, 2016. I wonder why and what will happen on that date or the next day?

@ Monika and Donna. Glad it was a help for Monika and am sorry it didn’t work for you, Donna. At one time the Historical Insights button worked for me because, at least for now, no unwelcomed pictures are appearing in my view of Life Story. Maybe there was once a button directly from Life Story, but there does not seem to be one there now. Also, a friend had what sounds to be a similar problem with freeze ups last night – her screen just sat there and she couldn’t add people or facts.

I understand that it is your right to change what you want, but I’d like to tell you what one single change – the Storyline – affected me. I am 80 years old. About 4 years ago I decided to put the results of my years of research on Ancestry, as I thought it most likely would stay around the longest. I asked my children to foot the bill for a subscription and I began methodically to input all research on my “Dobbins Family Tree.” This was no quick job. I worked for 40 years researching my family and had accumulated wonderful facts and proof that any other genealogist on those lines would think they’d died and gone to heaven if they found them. I also had written many family stories for my kids and grandkids and uploaded all of them too. This was a labor of love for the last four years and I was still inputting data when you made “the big change.” Now here’s the kicker: It absolutely broke my heart when I chose some random ancestors from the 1830-1930 period to see what your new Storyline had done for them. I could have cried. Nothing I found made any sense with the way your “algorithms” (if that is what did it) interpreted the simplest things. Taking a burial date and location and saying the person lived there when he/she died is not fact and not truth and nothing more than supposition. In fact, where a person is buried has nothing to do with where they died, and in every case, I found it shown wrong. Dates are wrong. Reasons are wrong. connections are wrong.

And another silly interpretation: Jack York was born in 1919 in Wichita. Ancestry stuck a HUGE picture of Wyatt Earp in at 1920 and said that it is possible that Jack York met Wyatt Earp who also lived in Wichita about that time. MY ONE-YEAR-OLD KID POSSIBLY KNOWING WYATT EARP??? iS THIS THE KIND OF STORY ANCESTRY IS INTERESTED IN FOSTERING? Give me a break!

Yes, I can go back and correct these errors and dispose of old Wyatt’s big face, and and I DID correct data on those five people I found. But guys, I’m not going to live long enough to make corrections to all my hard-earned facts that your new program so blithely destroyed. If I start making corrections, that effectively stops me from researching anything else. I have no quarrel with your graphics or size of the pictures. What I do have a quarrel with is leaving a mess for my children and grandchildren and future researchers down the line — a mess that started out as proved research and obscure documents giving sometimes shocking answers to problems, but Ancestry’s new program has turned all the data of conscientious researchers into trash. My heart breaks when I think of how all my years of research can no longer be counted on as being something that I have done. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to be associated with some of it.

My year renewal comes up on Jan 6, 2016. I have not yet decided whether I’m going to renew or not. If I do, will I work on correcting as much as I can before I die? Or leave the bad stuff and hunt for some more ancestors who may receive the same treatment? I really haven’t decided yet.
I don’t see that any correction you possibly could make now would undo all the damage that has been done. At least not in my lifetime. I am truly sick over this.

Please provide a way in New Ancestry for the tree owner to prevent the entire LifeStory view from appearing at all in trees that he or she owns, so that no one can see it unless the tree owner or an invited editor for the tree chooses to display it. This choice could be provided as an extension of the way the system currently refrains from showing the Historical Insights generated for the LifeStory view to anyone other than the tree owner and members invited as editors for a tree, unless a given Historical Insight is “accepted” for display to other members by the tree owner or an editor.

While some people may find the LifeStory view useful and be willing to manually correct the misleading or plainly false data entered into it by Ancestry’s computer-generated narratives, tree owners who find the intrusion useless or offensive should be able to completely block viewing of the feature by anyone in trees that they have created.

@Monika. Go to the top right corner when on the LIFE STORY page. You will see a SHOW button. When opened, the Family Events and Historical Insights appear there. Perhaps this is the place to turn one or both off for the LIFE STORY page. Hope it works!

Please put something in the LifeStory that says y’all concocted it, and that I **did not write it.** These are just too ineffectual and often genealogically wrong. I do not want to be associated with them.

Please restore the single-button “edit” link on the person Facts page that will take me to a single page where I can edit at least name, birth, death.

Your popup system for editing or adding items on the Facts page is not working well.

Half the time the initial selector popup just sits there and does not bring up the data entry form. Then half the time the data entry form takes forever to save (sometimes the save link does not work at all).

I just spent 40 minutes trying to enter a death date, having to refresh the Facts page over and over in order to get a working popup sequence. This would have taken about 10 seconds in Classic Ancestry to get the death data entered.

I have been a member for years now, and have been doing genealogy for over 30. But this new site is enough for me to gladly cancel my membership and I guess stop doing research. I cannot believe how much functionality we have lost in this new version, I am simply overwhelmed, frustrated, and ready to call it quits. This page was not laid out well at all, I can no longer quickly edit a person, see who their family is, and the new page no longer tells me my relationship to a person. I have never been SO disappointed in my life. I had planned on spending the next 2 weeks working on my tree, now I’m trying to find a place on the page to file a formal complaint and to figure out how to cancel my membership. I can see from this page that many, like myself are not the least bit pleased with this new site. PLEASE GO BACK and work out the kinks. Why did you fix something that was not broken?

I can honestly say that I HATE this new site. I also agree with others, the history page holds no value for me, and many times the info. is incorrect, and embarrassing.

Sell all of the DNA kits you want, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give us the option to go back to the old site.

In the OLD ancestry, all I had to do it put the cursor on a person “square” in the family tree (my tree or others) and immediately the place of birth, etc. would show up. NOW NOTHING. I have go into each one separately to see this. Darn, Darn, Darn. Please make the NEW ancestry as good as the old one used to be. Also, I really, really, miss the family connections. What in the world are you thinking – that was one of the most important things on the site – to be able to see others tree and compare with them. I used it continually. Again, what were you thinking. Darn, Darn, Darn. With this New ancestry.. I would NEVER have been able to do what I did. Darn, Darn, Darn

Until Ancestry permit me to totally disable / totally remove the joke of Life Story that they have concocted without my permission, my trees will remain private and also unsearchable. Until then, I do not have to use it and I won’t have the embarrassment of others seeing it.

Oh my Gawd!! The whining, the threats, the downright rudeness of my Ancestry family. I’d hate to spend the holidays at your place. Maybe you should talk politics and religion instead.
I love the new Ancestry. Love the lay out. Explains mistakes. Once you clean it up it will make sense to someone other that you.

Before I stand accused, no I am not a “noob” and I don’t work for Ancestry. I’ve been doing this for several years and have read books and have taken classes on the GPS and keep a close by copy of Evidence Explained. Just like your tree is never done, neither is your tree ever perfect.
If you believe your tree is destroyed because of what Ancestry “did to your tree”, it is more likely your data imput was crap. You didn’t take the time to read and understand formatting standards, (think dates), or came up with your own naming standard for places.
That is probably why your trees a mess. And no, I’m not here to take what crap trees you may have for offer. I don’t copy. I verify and add that person to my tree-manually. And guess what, my tree is sure to have flaws, but there are flaws because I put them in there. Once a.com came around with new programing to conform with the GPS, your previous crap entries will glare at you. Get to fixin’; you just thought it was right. And don’t complain about features that were valuable and taken away, when you haven’t even researched where the tab is to find it. For the sake this tree you seem so proud about, I hope you search harder, longer and smarter for a birth certificate than you did for the tools.
If you had the same photo show multiple times in a timeline, learn how manage you media better with an archive webinar with Christa. If you used a fact tag to indicate no Child, you are using the software wrong.
Could Ancestry use some constructive critzism? Yes. Read a blog post about how give CC. Don’t whine, be precise. It helps everyone.
It’s over folks. Put your pitchforks and torches down. New Ancestry is here to stay. I’m glad. I like it.

Thanks I can no longer use the old site. The new site takes to long. I don’t care for the new site and I don’t know how much longer I will use this site. People that have eye problems have a hard time using the new site. How could you do this when so many hate the new site. I like the old I can use it without much eye strain. Bring back the old site you may lose much more than you think. In fact it may make you lose more customers. What were you thinking?

@ Dora Jar. You self-righteous person! Who the heck do you think you are! The people who have been complaining here are people who do computer programming for a living. They are people who are professional genealogists (and if you bothered to read the complaints you would know that). They are people who take great pride in the work they have done! As do I! I have gone to Archives all over the world and have done my research the old fashioned way! I can read Suetterlein handwriting better than you ever will! (Assuming that you even know what that is!) The people on this blog have given SPECIFIC feedback since August and have gotten nothing but the cold shoulder treatment and platitudes back from ancestry. WE ARE THE CUSTOMERS! We have the right to complain when the product we are paying for is changed against our will and forced down our throats. If you interpret what we have done as “whining” you are saying more about yourself than about us. The same holds true if you say that you like New Ancestry. My trees are precise to the point of my being anal! I have ancestors and living cousins that were born in a country that was inhabited by Germans since the 12th Century. That land belonged at times to Germany and at times to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like my European counterparts (members of ancestry.uk and other European countries) I have emphasized to ACOM the importance of being historically accurate. The tree I prepared on ancestry.de (the German ancestry site) was created so that I can invite all my cousins who were born in that region to my tree so I can share my tree with them. These cousins were born in the region I described above, namely Bohemia, before 1940, as were their parents and ancestors whom I traced all the way back to the 15th century. In 1945 the United Nations decided to give this territory to the Czech Republic. When this occurred, the Czechs came knocking on the doors of my relatives at midnight, giving them half an hour to leave their homes. They took all of their jewelry of the fingers and told them to walk to the nearest train station where they were given the choice to enter a cattle car that was headed for Germany or a cattle car that was headed for Austria (countries that my relatives had never visited). Anyone who refused to enter one of the cattle cars was shot on the spot, as was one of my uncles. I have cousins who, to this day, sob when they remember this night! It is because of that that I have gone through great length to write my data historically correct. That means that I wrote down the name of the village in which each one of my cousins and their ancestors were born, naming the village, and region, as it was named when they were born and as it is named in their birth certificates. E.g., Dittersbach, Bohemia. Then, for accuracy’s sake I added IN PARENTHESIS (Now Stasov, Czech Republic). This way, it shows the accurate name of the town and State as it existed at the time they were born and as it shows in the birth/marriage and death records of the cousins and their ancestors and it guides those who want to know what these places are called today (or those who–like me–want to visit the places where our ancestors lived). However that does not change the fact that neither my cousins nor their ancestors were born in German territory and NOT in the Czech Republic. Then I added in the Source section the name of the Archives where I found the individual birth, marriage and death records, e.g., “Archives in Zamrsk, Czech Republic, Marriage Book. Volume, page number, etc.” I cannot be much more accurate than that. Then along comes ACOM and they add their LifeStory to each profile page, claiming that all these ancestors and my living cousins were all born in the Czech Republic. To tell my cousins, who were born before this territory became part of the Czech Republic and who were thrown out of their homes in the manner in which they were thrown out, that they were born in the Czech Republic is tantamount to telling a Palestinian who was born prior to 1940 in a village that is today in Israel, that he was born in Israel! If you do not have the cultural sensitivity to understand the importance of being historically and politically correct than you are not half as smart as you think you are. All I ever asked for of ACOM is to give me a button I can press so I can hide the stupid LifeStories. If you are the sort of person who can find value in the Life Stories, go ahead, enjoy that crap. If you do you cannot be as smart as you think you are, but that is not my problem!) I am not trying to take your joy away from you! I am only trying to get that garbage off my tree and I have the right to believe that ACOM does NOT have the right to add or delete anything from my tree. If you want to make New Years resolutions on how to become a better person, I recommend you work on your self-righteousness!

I guess it is late at night (2:30 a.m. here) and I am exhausted. This should read: However that does not change the fact THAT ALL OF MY COUSINS AND THEIR ANCESTORS WERE BORN IN GERMAN TERRITORY AND NOT IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC.

Sent an email to Ancestry stating how much I disliked the new format, their reply was slightly encouraging.
‘As the old site has now been retired, the new Ancestry is the only version of the site available. As such there are no plans CURRENTLY (my capitals) to restore the old site

The “new and improved” format for ancestry is horrible. More like something for a high school studen to use than a serious researcher. Why fix something that wasn’t broken. Shame on ancestry. I will NOT be renewing my membership. You have been adding nonsense photo’s to my files that take time from research to go in and get rid of – who cares when the Saturday Evening post was published? You rarely get the “stories” correct. You have my one aunt and uncle having one child and then in the next line it says they had 8 more when they only had 7 to begin with! The format is hard to follow. I cannot see the tree as it should be seen. I take the time to research and add FACTS and PHOTOS as I find them. I correct errors when I find them. This new format makes it too hard to do any sort of serious research at all. PLEASE ancestry – give us back the old UNBROKEN format and take this new one and throw it in the trash where it belongs. I don’t want life stories and I don’t want nonsense photos in my work! What a waste of time and money……money I will not be spending anymore on your site!

December 18: Looked at my tree, again. The ‘Life Story’ joke of functionality is still there. Again I am sickened and discouraged by what has happened to my tree due to the inane New Ancestry. The nightmare continues.

I do not care for the new ancestry. The old one was much easier to use. On the new one I cannot click on anything to see my relationship with the person I am researching. I hate the note that keeps popping up in the lower right corner.

Monika, so glad you set “her” straight. “Her” comments were more than insulting to us professional genealogists. Comments like the ones “she” made were condescending and made my blood boil. Thank you, Monika. If “she” like the new Ancestry that is her business but attacks on the genealogy community are not at all necessary.

Hi there. I have a question about the new AncestryDNA set-up, because it’s not working the way it did last week. I used to be included in 11 (eleven) “DNA Circles,” and that was helpful in a lot of ways. I subsequently took my tree “private,” for many of the reasons raised by others in previous posts – and ALL of my “DNA Circles” disappeared. Now I’m learning that DNA Circles are only being made available if we have our trees re-listed as “public.” Please explain why that policy changed when the new Ancestry format was rolled out. Is this latest move a heavy-handed way to try forcing our private trees to be public again? Please, please explain why Ancestry is taking away this important functionality for those of us who now choose to make our trees “private.” Please, either answer here or email me directly. Please.

where did the relationship calculator go? it no longer shows up for anyone in my tree even though I am set to the home person. Again, more stuff that doesn’t work and yet this monstrosity is rolled out. is anyone else having the same problem?

@Dora Jar – The operative word is “integrity”. Ancestry has taken the integrity from our trees. We are talking about history here and the importance of getting it right. Ancestry is re-writing our history and in an erroneous manner.

Absolutely hate the new system!!! We should have the option to use either the new or old system. The new system is very cumbersome and is not user friendly. I have been part of the Ancestry family of users for over ten years and I’m not sure I can still use one of the most wonderful sites ever produced for the public. Please, Ancestry, listen to those of us that use your site daily!!!! Thank You.

@ Dora Jar. I meant to bypass what you had said as someone perhaps who only had tunnel vision or your own agenda, and to let it go at that. I don’t mean to be rude back to you, but I do say AMEN to much of what Monika said and more! My tree is not “crap” as you say and it is not a “mess” – not at least until Life Story got hold of it.

I consider there to be two broad spectrum of trees on Ancestry – “Treasure Trees” and “Trash Trees” – and those that fall somewhere in the middle that one jovial Ancestry rep helped in an effort at alliteration to identify as “Trite”. I suppose it is up to the individual owner and the tree’s viewers to determine where each tree falls.

I, too, do not copy. I delight in hints – only to search them out myself – often adding multiple sources for the same information. My citations are well-researched and fully documented. I cringe to see all the paragraphed detail I provided in citations (from outside Ancestry) now being rolled into one long, mind-boggling paragraph.
I cringe even more to see the, albeit, scattered randomly throughout my tree, the situations in which Ancestry cannot properly read location. Thus several relatives born in the Southeastern US became born in “Barvaria, Germany”, and a beloved and elusive cousin whose burial place is “Location Unknown” became buried in “Location, Northern Cape, South Africa”. Granted, I can and will gladly change these things and even have some undertanding of how, in my tree’s case, they got that way. But it is mind boggling to think I would have to review 34,000+ profiles to search out and repair all discrepancies.

My tree represents years of study on pioneer families of a specific geographic region in the southeastern United States. With almost 3,000 surnames, it encompasses migrations from Virginia to California and a thousand places in between. While Monika, whose wisdom and input here I so very much admire, has a deeply-researched and well-documented tree, that Life Story seems to treat even more unkindly than mine. In my opinion, it is the more in-depth and detailed trees that get the worst of Life Story – a real irony since the best are being made the worst.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not a “whiner”. I, too, believe the new is here to stay and can rest easy that I did my part to try to point Ancestry in the right direction “pre-New”. I am doing my part now (for as long as I can “see” the site), to study and give feedback to Ancestry via the suggested link directly to the developers: support@ancestry.com

I am glad, Dora, if your tree and work have not been compromised. I wish you well and hope you will be gracious enough to accept the word of others who tell you their work has been affected for the worse.

I want Ancestry.com to succeed. They (in addition to FTM, for what that is now worth) are the receptacle of my hard work. The feedback we all can give them now and, hopefully their attention and response, may be able to bring Ancestry back up to ease-of-use and some semblance of par. I know we need it and Ancestry.com needs it too.

There are not words in English to adequately describe how much I HATE the new Ancestry. It’s slow, clumsy and ugly, and the new “features” are nothing I was ever interested in having. On top of that, now I find that the relationship calculator no longer works, and not matter how many times or how closely I follow the so-called instructions for activating, it, it simply doesn’t exist. I will be cancelling my subscription.

I finally bit the bulllet about a month ago and started using NEW in ordr to acquaint myself with alll the “Hide N Seek” changes…

I STILL don’t like it but have been adjusting and finding things BUT there are continual GLITCHES…one day something works the next day it doesn’t.

I checked my tree when I read a comment that relationships were not showing and sure enough–that feature WAS working and now it is not.

Every time I turn around I find something else not working or hidden behind a door that I cannot find yet.

This is getting REALLY OLD Ancestry! I was going to D/L 2014 this weekend (for the 3rd time as the first 2 times did not work) but dare not while you are having all these glitches. Who knows what kind of mess I will wind up with.

ANCESTRY WE ARE SICK AND TIRED OF THINGS NOT WORKING–AND LIFE STORY IS A JOKE.

2 days ago while reviewing my 3 x GGM, who was born in IRE and lived there until 1848 when she came here–I found something in life story about being in New England during some kind of freeze when she was 2 years old–HELLO? She was born in 1814 and came to the US (New York City) in 1848—HOW do you figure she was in New England at the age of 2?

PLEASE get some programmers to fix all these problems who know what they are doing…

We cannot count on anything being correct at the moment–and this has been going on for months!

You should NEVER have cut off OLD until you had all these issues fixed…

I still wish we had OLD–it was MUCH better especially for serious researchers—I am SO happy I have pretty much completed my tree, lest some miracle happens with Irish Records—

BUT I know I need to go back, review everyone and tweak things here and there—
At this point though, it is hard to tell MY errors from your system not doing what it should be doing…

I have WORK to do and YOU are holding me up because I cannot count on your NEW version to work one moment to the next.

YOU have taken all the joy out of working on your website ANCESTRY–It is just one frustration after another.

We shouldn’t be surprised that FTM was dropped. The company is obviously run by accountants who are only interested in extracting cash from their customers. Forget the thousands of hours people have spent using FTM for so many years. No regard for their loyal customers, it’s just about making more money. Of course, FTM has gone downhill every since they replaced version 16. Won’t it be interesting to see how wise their latest business decision turns out…

What is this “Life Story” feature trying to accomplish? As far as I can tell it just gives a very broad and very sophomoric summary of what was going on in the world at the time of that person’s life. As family historians we have gone way beyond that stage and have been dealing with the actual events that happened in our family members’ lives. Today I decided to look at the “Life Story” feature for one of my ancestors who was a prisoner at Andersonville ( you may have heard of that horrible place ) and later was on the Sultana when it exploded on the Mississippi River. He survived both and died in 1932. OK, what I get is a huge picture of Wyatt Earp and other stuff that has no bearing on his life whatsoever but no mention of Andersonville or the Sultana which were a big part of his Life Story. I am afraid to check out what you have deemed as the “Life Story” for his brother who received the Medal of Honor for action at Vicksburg and as a surviving member of the 13th, later was an official poll bearer for Gen. Sherman. These are the Life Stories that need to be shared not some abstract stuff that you have decided to waste serious researchers time with. Earlier I wrote that I would not say I HATED these changes because I was trying to be nice. I am no longer being nice…I HATE what you have done to this website. You have succeeded in “dumbing down” our family histories for us. I am very unimpressed! I have also noted that as many of us have been writing here, you have stopped trying to address our complaints. This just adds to the frustration. Further more, do you even know the significance of Vicksburg or Gettysburg? Yup, I have not checked what you put in for my Great Great Grandfather’s life story yet, I am afraid to, as he was part of the Iron Brigade (Co. F of the 7th Wisconsin) that was almost totally wiped out in the first day of fighting at Gettysburg. And forget about trying to look at what you have written about his brother-in-law and his significant real life story. I am totally disappointed with what you have done to this site. Please give some indication that you are at least listening to us.

You’ve ruined thousands of peoples’ hobby and research and the next year will tell the tale as more of your loyal customers become aware of the mess this research tool is in. Then the migration and cancellations will truly begin because it is all out there now and on public view. All out in the WWW.

Pretty much impossible to work on my tree today because relationships are not showing. New Ancestry is nothing less than a faulty product. Tired of hearing “Sorry,” “apologies,” “working on it,” “appreciate your patience,” and “we unfortunately have no exact time frame for when this will be corrected.” That all boils down to “WE HAVE NO CLUE.”

Does anyone know how to find a person’s “relationship to me”? I thought it would be on the FACTS page, but I have clicked all over, but can’t seem to find it. I have only seen it on the HINTS page. HELP!!!

John, I like your idea on point number 5 about having an ancestor’s DNA circle appearing on his or her. I agree it might encourage more related cousins to take the test. Even if Ancestry doesn’t want to share the whole DNA circle info for the sake of privacy, they could still make a DNA symbol on the ancestor’s page, indicating that there is a DNA circle for that ancestor.

@ Diane Turnbull. If we are referring to the same thing, and I think we are, the “relationship” button, as recently as yesterday, was directly under the person’s name and dates in the banner on both the FACTS and LIFE STORY page. It cited the confusing “cousin of second cousin twice removed” etc. A double click on that detail would then yield the familiar drop down list of people, dates and their relationship, leading to you. Hope they haven’t removed it and are just working on it, because it was intact when I last saw it.

I am concerned about the “Edit Relationship” feature that is found under EDIT in the top right corner of the FACTS and LIFE STORY page. Has anyone used it? It looks so different and the “X” so ominous that I fear total annihilation of the person I “X” out.

Previously, we could remove a parent-child relationship, followed by the addition of an “add mother” or “add father”. All could be accomplished at the same time. Help will be appreciated.

Relationship calculator worked yesterday, but is not working today. I suppose management and senior IT crew are joyfully off on their holiday vacations, and that we can expect little in the way of problems being addressed, much less fixed.

Like most of the other commenters I am very unhappy with New Ancestry. But I am trying to work with it in the hopes that you will improve it.

I find the new format very “messy” and agree with other posts recommending moving the Sources section back to the bottom. This would give more space for the Facts and Family section and be visually more pleasant.

I also very much miss the Media section previously visible on the Profile page which included important personal Photographs and Stories. These are now lumped together in Gallery along with other less relevant data such as digital census copies that can easily be accessed elsewhere on the page.

One specific issue regarding Census records attached to an individual –
When I click on the source citation I can still get an indexed record listing the individual’s data and all household members. However I am no longer able to click on the other household members to bring up their data and attach their record to their profile. This was a particularly useful feature for grandchildren, in-laws and other family members that can not be automatically attached when the record is first reviewed. Is there any other easy way to do this???
Hopefully this feature can be reinstated.

I hate the New Ancestry site. HATE. It is for kids not people who are serious. I do not need written out timelines for my family. Probably not going to hang around. Just can’t take the dumbing down Ancestry thinks I need. You need to listen to your customers and we do not like this.
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I hate the New Ancestry site. HATE. It is for kids not people who are serious. I do not need written out timelines for my family. Probably not going to hang around. Just can’t take the dumbing down Ancestry thinks I need. You need to listen to your customers and we do not like this.

Thanks, Mary. I won’t be afraid then to use the “Edit Relationship” the next time it’s needed. It, like everything else, just looks so different now.

@ donna goodwin. Sounds like things are still going and coming for some of us. The “Relationship to Me” also briefly came back a short while ago, but only showed a partial dropdown list for a while. I am no expert on this, but with the “freeze ups”, I wonder if rebooting your computer might help – sometimes when all else fails . . .

You might also call the Ancestry reps at 1-800-262-3787 to see what’s going on. They are there until 8:00 PM Rocky Mountain Time.

@ Mary Fredrick. This may help. When you open a source citation that is already attached to an individual, you get what looks like the transcription view. At the top of the view, however, are two buttons, VIEW IMAGE and VIEW RECORD.

Click on VIEW RECORD to open up the transcription as we once knew it. From there, you CAN add the record to other family members. I think this is what you are asking and hope it helps.

Historical Insights are not only irrelevant, but completely inaccurate. The arrival fact for this person is 1912, so why is the insight tagged as 1903 and then in the text it says “in 1915?”
(Purple timeline tag)OCT
1903
AGE 0
New York Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank
“In 1915, Robert Pryde was living in New York City and may have patronized the New York Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank.”
I DEMAND THAT ANCESTRY REMOVE THIS KIND OF GARBAGE FROM MY TREE! And don’t tell me I can ignore it; that’s not good enough.

I just deleted my ancestry.com tree, dna results and cancelled my subscription. I was a member since 20 Mar 2006. What incredible arrogant jerks. They can’t even trouble themselves to reply to all these comments. Goodbye “Shaky Leaf”

I always try to find the date of the records I save to a person. Put the dates (day and month) back in the Facts column on the far left of the dots with the long connecting purple line. It is much easier to eyeball all dates vertically than to have to look inside the source/ record box. It’s a much better way to check for age discrepancies or missing dates for a record. We only need to see the year ONE time. Keep the ages. It’s easier to spot an age discrepancy in a vertical line. People lied about their ages, or didn’t remember, or someone else gave the information, or they just didn’t know the exact date so they guessed. This was one good thing in the classic version that I used constantly. It does no good to be inside the record box. You can’t immediately tell if the date is missing or incomplete. Keep the ages there too. We don’t need the year indicated twice.

Keep all dates as day, month, year. XX-XXX-XXXX Example: 18 Dec 2015. Do not go to numbers for the months. There is no way to tell what a month is unless there is a number over 12 in the complete date. Simple, keep it simple!!!

Can’t add much, but want to be counted among those who hate the new site because ancestry has chosen form over function and added hours to my genealogy tasks. I will be canceling as soon as I find an alternative unless the old version is restored.

I’ve already told you I think the new Ancestry is ugly and poorly designed. Now I want to comment on all the errors I’m finding in my trees. The best one was in my own profile. Apparently I was living in Chicago 8 years before I was born. This is something I never had in my info. Good job on the transfer of information, she said sarcastically. I’ll not be renewing my subscription. How can hold your heads up after this fiasco that you expect your users to wade through and waste hours trying to straighten out.

I became a paying customer when you developed the ability to sync between FTM & your website. Without FTM & the ability to sync I will remove all of my research from your website. I will delete your app from my phone. I will then cancel my subscription.

Spoke with the Ancestry executive office today about the forced move from the old, working, Ancestry.com to the new, glitch, Ancestry.com. They said the problems with the new ancestry are Known Problems with no estimate of when it would be fixed, and yet they went ahead with the forced move. In my world whoever was in charge of that decision would most likely be fired. We don’t have the luxury of alienating even a small portion of our clients. Competition is to fierce and technology to fluid to loose customers, possibly never to get them back. Fortunately they were able to accomplish a workaround for my situation, at their expense. Pointing out again why the forced moved with all the glitches was a really bad decision.

I see the comment counter has become a work of fiction too. I assume the disappearing comments have been removed intentionally (or maybe its just one of Ancestry’s many and increasing glitches) and you figure your customers are too stupid to notice. You are such an arrogant organisation. Oh, by the way, facebook rating down to 2.1 – lets see just how low you can get.

December 19: signed into my tree. The inane New Ancestry’ still there with that ridiculous Life Story . I HATE it. Could that be any clearer to Ancestry mgt? Old Ancestry had dignified profile pages, well laid out. New Ancestry? Basically it’s a joke, but it’s not funny. The nightmare continues….

OK, I understand that I don’t need to look at the absurd Lifestory page if I don’t want to see it, but how do I keep others visiting my tree see it? It is still my tree and my name is still attached to it. I don’t what people looking at my tree and seeing incorrect map locations, irrelevant historical references, or whatever else Ancestry feels like adding to my work. I feel like it reflects on the quality of my research. For Ancestry to take my work and add their own crap and present it as part of my tree is completely unethical.

(correcting typos) OK, I understand that I don’t need to look at the absurd Lifestory page if I don’t want to see it, but how do I keep others visiting my tree from seeing it? It is still my tree and my name is still attached to it. I don’t want people looking at my tree and to see incorrect map locations, irrelevant historical references, or whatever else Ancestry feels like adding to my work. I feel like it reflects on the quality of my research. For Ancestry to take my work and add their own crap and present it as part of my tree is completely unethical.

“Many of us are struggling a great deal with the color and clutter of the FACTS page just to be able to work on our trees.

A fourth work page would solve that dilemma and make our work and research via Ancestry enjoyable and productive again.

Elements of the page should consider color palette, less clutter and absence of the purple backlight, purple lines and the “emphasis” outline with “dancing” edit button caused by cursor movement.

A two-column work page with the ability to add, edit and attach sources to other facts straight from the fact block would eliminate all the above, except color. Also don’t forget to keep the date and age of the individual in a far left timeline column. That quick, uncluttered, reference format also helps eye strain and aids in research.”

@mark. You articulated my objection to Lifestory and HI so very well. Their crap is reflecting on the quality of my research. Turning it off for me only is not acceptable. I want to turn it off so that NOBODY can see it, ever!

Is there an attorney in this blog??
I purchased the old version; doesn’t this change provide the basis for a class-action suit against ancestry for not fulfilling their contract obligations to those of us who purchased the older version?
I agree with all the comments that the new version of ancestry.com has destroyed my data and ruined my tree. I won’t stay with ancestry unless I am allowed the option to use the “old” version. I’m currently looking at other genealogy sites and will make my move in the new year. Ancestry you don’t have long to make the needed accommodations for those of us who dislike your newest version.
Money is the bottom line and I’m taking mine and moving to a new venue.
P.S. Yesterday I posted on Facebook my new opinion of ancestry, alerting my friends to the disastrous changes adopted by ancestry.com.

Was very upset to find that ONLY the new Ancestry is available now. I’ve tried it and its way too busy for me. The reasons why, as a researcher, I don’t like this are too numerous to list here. I feel that Ancestry has not been listening to it’s longtime customers. You’ve taken a good product and made it much worse. I’m not sure if you’ve done this just for the sake of change but was not an improvement.

A few more observations… What is with this “What do you want to do today” banner on the home page? It’s a blatant advertisement that covers more than half the screen on my smaller devices. Shrink it or get rid of it as this is yet another irritant that makes me not want to use your site. Looks like a ripoff of Windows 9 apps which was a big mistake for Microsoft. So you copy epic failures – yeah, that’s now Ancestry’s style! New topic: why don’t you spend some money and time getting the database cleaned up? I have had dead hints – over 50+ in my trees for years and no amount of complaining to your tech support has done any good. I was told your systems clean this up over time, but as I said, it’s been years! Fix stuff that is broken first,and stop changing stuff for the worse! Do you remember when the online tree was enhanced so one could click the arrow in a circle on the earliest generation shown and get the next few generations? When that beta came out, it was so great, I turned on that feature and never turned it off. We need great enhancements like that one and not tripe like you put out today. Other new features I need: need a checkbox to mark a record as “not verified” so others can see when I am trying out a theoretical relationship but joy ready to call it confirmed. Need a way to block all comment on my pictures, stories, and other media, since the comments section has just turned into Twitter and Facebook like crap. I am SO NOT interested in who thinks the 12th or 13th great grandchild of certain people! Crap, just useless crap! Also want a way to tag the cutesy pictures people post as spam so they no longer show up in hints. I have no interest in immigrant ships, historically incorrect flag and coats of arms (coats of arms do not apply to anyone with the same surname, people – just a certain house) and worse yet the pics that name someone as your direct ancestor – who the heck is going to be interested in that? There are many more problems you could be fixing instead of spending your time and our money on historical insights that likely do not apply to a particular ancestor and computer generated life stories that do not capture the true spirit of an ancestor’s life. All the crap in a format that I can barely read and cannot find the functions in anymore. Get your own house in order, Ancestry!!!

Yes I agree with all the above. I don’t like the new site, it is dark, to much useless information on one page and doesn’t look professional ? We should of been given a choice to stay on the old site. So come on Ancestry listen to the people who pay the money and use the site. Very disappointed !!!

I am really peeved now that I am being forced to use the new program. Just going in and NOT being able to select a persons profile and then toggle to THEIR family tree which seems simple enough frustrates me. Why would I want to see WORLD events in my relatives tree? Yes I understand that there was a WWI and a WW2 in their lifetime, and yes I see that I can turn that off if I wish. On and on – looks like this is a loser based on the number of comments

Put your big girl/boy panties on and admit you made a mistake. A rather large one. I’ll never join Ancestry again. I am so thankful I have most of what I need. I can live with the fact I may never find out records I need to go to Ireland and Berlin to locate. I’ll keep searching but not on Ancestry. Who hired you?

Sorry Kendall Hulet. Have tried to work with your new Ancestry format, I do not like, sections of it are puerile. Can you please restore the option of the old Ancestry format or you will lose my subscription which is due February 2016. UK time 16:24, 19 Dec 2016.

Wasting a whole lot of time and effort for nothing: No relationship shown most of the time. Phantom hints winking at me or, worse, real hints to Virginia Wills and Probate that then hit me with “PLEASE SEARCH AGAIN.” Same stuff, new day. Actually, it’s MORE stuff each day.

NEW ANCESTRY.GOD now shows aka surnames for children (including adults) which reflect the married name(s) of the mother’s second, third, etc., husband(s) where no adoption has taken place. My dear grandmother was married four times so her children could end up with a birth surname, a married surname and surnames for each of grandma’s marriages and another if they were to remarry…

I absolutely detest the new layout. I keep looking every day to see if I can get used to it, but I hate it too much to spend more than a couple of minutes on it.
The “Lifestory” is an insult to our intelligence and bears no relevance to the life of my ancestors.
I have six months remaining on my subscription, so will be asking for a 50% refund, as this is not the Ancestry that I renewed.
Very unhappy.

Someone needs to get fired over this! So bad in so many ways and they ARE NOT LISTENING!!! Where’s the customer first mind set? They think we will just get used to having a poor product and forget the used to have a product that mostly worked. Sad, so sad.

It is a sorry state of affairs when change is made for under the guise of it’s better. If your goal as a company is to provide bring in new researchers at the expense of experienced researches you have succeeded. I truly thought that Ancestry would not abandoned scholarly research but they have. There has been an unwillingness on the companies part to embrace both new and seasoned researches. All of the features that are absolutely necessary for solid well researched information are no longer available. You really should rename your family trees to FICTIONAL FAMILY HISTORIES. At least then you would be telling the truth.

These changes now have me worried as clearly their IT guys are inept. The same inept IT guys that are supposed to be keeping my personal data including credit card details secure. With all the hacking going on it is likely ancestry systems are vulnerable with these IT guys in charge.

The dumping of FTM is the worst thing Ancestry can do. I dont like the new site at all but could probably live with it. Still don’t see how the information on the App will show details on people who are obviously born in England as being born in the USA.

Consider putting your thoughts on the TrustPilot website, a website just for the purpose of reviewing companies, in addition to here. Some of the more recent reviews there seem to be ‘plants’. Honestly comment there how you feel about New Ancestry, the FTM discontinuance, and/or Ancestry management of the whole change process.

Looking at the new Ancestry and want to bring up more problems. The source column is stuck between the chronological events colum and the relatives (parents and children) column. Why would yo do this? It is much easier to see the overall picture when the events and relatives were right next to each other. The sources do not need to be in the middle of it all. They were better off left near the bottom of the page.

Like virtually all of the people who have already commented, I am not happy with the changes to the website – which is less functional than before. Nor am I impressed with the decision to drop FTM. I am at the point in my research where I am looking for a PC-based software so that I can ensure my research is maintained and preserved. I simply don’t trust others to do that for me. I was looking at FTM as the best solution when it was announced that it would no longer be sold or supported. I am expecting a six month Ancestry subscription for Christmas and I will use that time to find an appropriate software and move my data off Ancestry.

Ancestry has clearly made a business decision and will be prepared to ride out the initial wave of protest. With Christmas just around the corner, expect to see lots of Ancestry TV ads which will entice more people to subscribe, thereby offsetting those who are leaving.

Ancestry somehow didn’t get the memo that to get and keep paying customers, you have to accommodate their needs. I started with Family Treemaker, and only became interested in the Ancestry website when they linked the twqo. Before that, I found Ancestry to be a dinosaur of a website, completely user unfriendly and a pain in the as* to navigate. It was only because of the interface between FTM and ancestry that I had interest in working with Ancestry. Any and all attempts to work directly on the ancestry site has been consistently frustrating and unproductive, other than providing some information. That is a huge thing of course, we are looking for information, right? Without Family Treemaker, the value of Ancestry drops dramatically. It is almost as easy to search out the information directly than to go through Ancestry to get it. The other thing is that other databases are cheaper and easier to access than ancestry. With each new update, and with each new attribute in terms of information, Ancestry becomes more difficult and more expensive. They are consistent in not listening to their clients and creating an easy to use website that readily appeals to their paying audience. Frankly, money isn’t the issue…..if the website prices reflected the amount of information and the ease of access, I’d pay whatever was necessary. I have that ability, whereas many genealogists may not. However, we are all looking for value for our dollars and increasingly Ancestry does not offer it. Without FTM, their product is a miserable interaction that may or may not prodice information. They somehow think that the Ancestry Cloud they propose instead of the FTM program is better. Maybe it is…..for them….as they can charge monthly fees for us to access it, but we are smarter than they are, apparently, and understand that without a hard copy back-up in a program such as Family Treemaker, our family information is vulnerable. It is unacceptable to any intelligent researcher.

If their websire functioned and looked like FTM, they might have had a chance of keeping their dollars coming in. It seems ridiculous to anyone but them that they would dump the FTM program without a reasonable alternative in place. They show how thoughtlessly they make business decisions by not having a plan in place. They want us to wait while they evaluate what they might do on Jan 1, 2017, when they stop servicing the FTM program. Ancestry, WE WILL BE LONG GONE by then. I’ve had a love hate relationship with Ancestry. The only reason I’ve been loyal to them is because of the flow of information into my FTM program. Without that, the love is gone. Ancestry has not listened to its clients time and time again, as they continue to focus only on dollars and not customers. They seem to have forgotten that the customers have the dollars they seek. It’s a pity to see them be less than they were, and less than they can be. Our loyalty has been abused and we are ready to bail. Any response to that, ANCESTRY.COM? You are hearing thousands upon thousands, upon thousands of complaints. You’ve offered us nothing in the way of solutions, consolations or future improvements. Our patience with you after all these years of miscalculated “improvements” on your part has worn us out. We’re not interested in conforming to who you choose to be. You conform to us, the payers and supporters of your business or you lose us.

Many serious genealogists have, over the years, populated the ancestry site with trees that are well sourced and verified, thereby enabling others to share in their information. More recently, the ancestry site has been populated with casual genealogists who copy, paste and share any old data at all resulting in a propagation of absolute rubbish throughout the ancestry search mechanism. With the apparent exodus of serious genealogists from the ancestry site, the available data will become even less reliable but I doubt that ancestry cares. Their modus operandi appears to be to create a web site for the masses of unprofessional genealogists who want to quickly populate a tree with no concern over accuracy of their data. For ancestry, it’s clearly a case of pursuing volume over quality of data.

This betrayal of their customers must be connected with Ancestry’s new interest in the mHealth market with their catchy new AncestryHealth. So, it seems they are probably plotting a radical change of direction and in their excitement have decided to write us all off with cancelled FTM and a sub-standard website. That’s fine, off you pop into the health market Ancestry – we’re heading elsewhere to continue our genealogical researching without you. But, without your customers, your health information might just be a bit short of data. Shame if it doesn’t work out for you eh. http://mhealthintelligence.com/news/making-the-family-tree-a-decision-support-tool.

Thanks Jane, I have to agree with you. They are failing in almost all areas. I don’t use FTM but the planned discontinuation of that program was a deal breaker for many, and I can well understand why.

I’m having my own struggles but I have learned a lot in the past few days. I don’t think the site will ever be as user friendly as it used to be. I plan to send as many emails as I can since I’m not confident that “they” check these blogs religiously.

I have been a paying member of Ancestry from almost when it first was available. I am a 35+ year genealogy researcher, so I started before Ancestry existed. My background is in marketing, and in database technology. I have watched Ancestry’s progression from a great service that was growing leaps and bounds to suddenly a horrible corporation who lost sight of its mission. I watched as the results of databases suddenly shifted away from providing wonderfully accurate results to bloated, unrealistic results. Seemingly this was to provide more ‘hits’ regardless of whether they were even relative to the query. Ancestry was sold a few times, and each time they have moved further and further from their customers needs. I grant you, Ancestry has added some great content. But as a corporation you have made some horrible mistakes. I sense now it is entire a money making venture, and has little to do with what I NEED. I AM YOUR CUSTOMER. I “get” why you went to a new layout — you wanted to provide service to the growing number of people using you on tablets and Iphones. I get it really, and that you own HeritageQuest, and you want to use the same interface. I get it all. But in that process you have given decision-making ability to people who do not research their own family trees every day. And so people who know nothing about genealogical research are making the final decisions. SO sad for you. Don’t listen to the YES people, who want to affiliate with you, or work for you, or cosy up to you. Listen to the people who complain, because really one bad comment about you is going to travel much further than the “yes people.” “ANCESTRY, you know nothing. And winter is coming (for you)” lol.

Jock, I appreciate your comment about “casual” genealogists, but were you not one in some way to start with? If you wish to, you can count me in that ilk, but I joined Ancestry to find my family history, as well as my wifes – completely amateur. The Classic system allowed me to learn from others more experienced, correct my mistakes, build my tree with growing confidence. Now Ancestry seems to have taken that away from all of us.

I hope your listening to your customers. I have been one for @7-8 years now. The new look in plain words is nauseating to look at. It actually bother’s my eyes and I can’t stay on to long. It’s been a great run with you and I have learned a lot but unless I can get the old format back I will not renew.

I am on a “pay monthly” basis, and if the system does not improve/revert, when I have found a way to save or transfer all my information, I will end my membership. To me, it is upsetting that I have found so much information, and had so much help, that it is being destroyed in what looks like the quest for the Dollar/Pound/Euro and however many other currencies are paid to Ancestry.

In my great grandmother’s life story as written by Ancestry, she marries herself:
When Isabelle Ellis Purple was born about 1874, in Connecticut, her father, Norman, was 40 and her mother, Mary, was 36. She married Charles E Hayes and they had two children together. She then married Isabelle E Purple on March 3, 1897, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She died on August 1, 1948, in Pasadena, California, at the age of 74. Please fix it Ancestry. I am not paying you to humiliate me.

I too am disgusted and disappointed. I’ve done yrs of research only to have it disappear because you have changed what can be in the box. My gr grandfather was a character and I found many details about his almost notorious life which now has all disappeared w/new added that this date his third child was born. Please return old format at least long enough for me to copy by old informative trees. I would like my pictures returned, many have gone. We need a response!

If you won’t kill Lifestory altogether, at least try to get it right. The issue of twins has been reported and acknowledged over and over. So Ancestry HALF fixed it. Tonight, with a new set of twins, I see:
Main para: “When A and her twin sister B were born on ____, etc.” (thank you Ancestry). But just below that…
Birth of sister: “A’s sister B was born on ___ when A was less than a year old.”
I CERTAINLY HOPE SO!

Thanks, Mike C, for posting that web addy. I’m going to try to read all of the posts. It will take some time. Somehow I missed all the hub-bub about the new site until just a couple of months ago. The date on those posts started 19 Feb 2015, exactly 10 months ago!

If “they” are just now having a conference after all this time…well either they were not interested before, or maybe enough people are cancelling their subscriptions that they are noticing it on their bottom line.

This wouldn’t solve the myriad of problems, but would make me feel a bit better should I ever make my tree public and searchable again. Ancestry should consider adding a disclaimer at the top of every LIFE STORY page. Whether they would or not is up for debate. A disclaimer might read something like:

“You are viewing the Ancestry-generated LIFE STORY for __(name of individual)__. Due to interface between the Old and the New Ancestry formats, on occasion some detail and data, including location, as it appears in LIFE STORY, may not present uniformly. For comparison with the tree owner’s actual research, please refer to the FACTS page that accompanies this page.”

Another suggestion is that when the number of children is addressed in LIFE STORY’S initial paragraph, the number should be preceeded by “at least”. Many times in my early years of research, I only included and followed the children who interested me. I now know better and make it a point to try to identify ALL the children at first, and then research those that I can. Under the present LIFE STORY, only the listed children are included in the count – thus the need for the inclusion of “at least” preceeding the number of children LIFE STORY recognizes.

Just thoughts – trying to make the best of a less than perfect situation !!!

Well, I’ve already canceled my membership and ordered Legacy software. I’ll keep my FTM going as long as I can, because I love the software and I have a huge investment in data that won’t automatically migrate, but I won’t trust it anymore.
When you cancel your membership, you still have access until the day it expires, so I have a few weeks to see what the new “New” Ancestry is like. I’ve been a loyal customer since 2000, so I’ve seen lots of changes, but never such dumbing down of a respected website. I checked out just one ancestor and the Lifestory included her alternate birth site, not the preferred one. Her death site was also wrong. The information under Facts is correct, just the Lifestory is wrong. Seems like some gremlins in the programming.
I was proud to use Ancestry because it was the best genealogy website when I began doing online genealogy after 30 years of doing it the old fashioned way. I don’t believe any site will give me the confidence I had in the original ancestry.com, but I have no qualms about canceling.
For those who accuse the naysayers as just being resistant to change, I’ve been working with computers since 1981 and have seen vast changes since then, and I know when the changes are for the better. This is not the case here.

A message I wrote ten minutes ago, that was visible in this blog a few minutes ago, has now disappeared. So, I will try again. Another thing that I thought about after reading the February 19 blog of ACOM: It reads “Unfortunately, we’re not all great storytellers…”. You are right ancestry, YOU STINK AT IT!

So disappointed…so sad…so frustrated!
12 years of loyal membership and now I feel like I need to find a place to start all over….and I don’t want to do that! But I am so unhappy and so tired of reading your canned responses to all the postings. They are empty words.

Are you doing away with the Relationship Calculator??? WTH?!!! SO SICK of the never-ending changes and downgrades to this site and the ever-growing mountain of utter F#@$!&* BS we are being forced to endure!!! >:(

And, IF I ever make my tree public again I think I will edit the summary on each person’s LifeFiction page and ad the following: WARNING! This fairy tale was created entirely by Ancestry.com’s computer and has absolutely nothing to do with my ancestors!

I expect nothing, but still I am disappointed. I didn’t like the trial version of the “new” Ancestry, and I don’t like being forced into it. Last week I paid $100 to upgrade FTM, only to finds it will no longer be supported…why wasn’t it withdrawn from sale? Ancestry is useful, but it is expensive and full of mistakes. The new site is cumbersome, difficult to master, and adds stories to lives that I don’t want added. I am actively seeking alternatives.

Having worked in the digital space for over 20 years as a digital strategist, designer, UX and many other roles, I can professionally say this new site design is a disaster. It goes against all customer experience and usability best practices (based on solid research) out there. This looks like it was designed to meet the needs of the management of Ancestry and not the end users. Yes change is hard, however it should be about making things easier to use and not harder and more complicated.

Bring back the old design and old features – it worked. What you have now is a nightmare. Sticking with this pathetic design have send your customers and their money elsewhere.

This is a classic case of a big company telling its loyal, PAYING customers: “Oh, so you don’t care for what we’re doing? Go away then.” I’ve been a member for more years that I can count, but I need to see what alternatives are out there. The new site is miserably unfriendly, and of course there’s no help finding the things that one used to be able to easily get at. I just hate this; an important part of my life has now been ruined by these corporate XXXXXs.

Whilst I do not have a large Ancestry data base I have just found out that unless I was more specific where and when people were born, married and died if a name is generic to other places in the world it records. I have just found out that my grandfather was married in Bermuda. Yeah right. This now means that I have to go through ALL my names and make corrections. How do I get back to the old Ancestry site. The computer programme should not assume that St Peter Hamilton is in Bermuda. Really slacked off

I contacted Ancestry after the change over to the new format. I was told we had all received e mails re this but I am sure I have not been informed. When they first introduced this some time ago I did not like it so I was able to revert to the old, more user friendly, format. This time I cannot do this and I am stuck with an extremely irritatingly format that is taking twice as long to use. If Ancestry do not allow those that want to use the old format to do so I am not renewing my membership and will take down my trees.

Have cancelled Ancestry subscription. A cousin is in process of moving Ancestry files elsewhere. I tried, however, THE NEW …AND what a horror. The Life Story used to be an option for Tree member to make and add photos that he or she wanted. Ancestry took control of that. I tried to add photos to one of their unwanted Life Stories. That was interesting. I tried to choose from Media Gallery – photos I had already added to profile. Could not do that. I had to go back to my Scan File, pull wanted photo from there, add to story, go Media Gallery and delete as it was a duplicate of what I had previous added to profile. The person I was working on – like most of my tree – had ONE Page with Text & Photos …think Face Book page. Now there are three …ugly, cluttered, glad I have left So sad to see a once venerable company over the years self destruct and finally implode for the only reason I can understand … profit …greed…but Ancestry certainly does not exist for its customers …some users having amazing genealogical skills, excellent research documented and accurate …other things I observed through the eyes of a former librarian ….that was my career.

I TOTALLY agree with Lorna P’s comment. I’ve been an Ancestry subscriber since 2004, but have used other websites such as FindMyPast and until a year ago I had a subscription with both sites (as FMP covered Cheshire). However, I would ALWAYS recommend Ancestry for speed and ease of use. It was so much more user-friendly than FMP.

I cancelled my world-wide subscription over a year ago, and am definitely not tempted to resubscribe to Ancestry even though I have several extensive and well researched family trees on Ancestry.

The first insult was the ‘new search’ which I believe has only improved due to feed back from users – i.e. by including features of the OLD SEARCH!

Now we have the new hideous profile pages that no longer show how a person’s life was played out. The new format is totally underwhelming and ugly. I certainly don’t feel like ‘inviting’ family members to view our family tree!

As I recently wrote on a genealogy forum…
it’s those of us who’ve linked hundreds of records to our trees that have made Ancestry so user friendly and have contributed to the success that it is today (because it makes those records easier for others to find). Because of this, Ancestry have acknowledged that those who have trees are ‘contributors’ even though they may never have transcribed a single record.

It’s so sad to see such a super site destroyed in this way – it’s no longer enjoyable to use and no longer a pleasure to look at.

My second cousin likes using FMP, but was seriously impressed when he saw our family tree on Ancestry – I doubt that still holds true.

ANCESTRY, I NO LONGER SING YOUR PRAISES TO OTHERS AND CAN NO LONGER RECOMMEND YOUR SITE. (sorry for upper case, but no one seems to be listening!) 🙁

I have been a Member for many years
I am only able to do research through the Internet because of illness.
This site is overwhelming for me, I have great difficulty in using it,
I see no reason for changing.
I changed from the World Membership this year, next year I will not be coming back.
FMP are going to profit from Ancestry not listening to their members.

This is an impressive outpouring of customer anger at the management of ancestry.com, an anger I find myself completely sharing. Between the dumbed-down new design and the forthcoming end of support for FTM, it is clear to me that the company has decided that more profit can be made from new customers with limited needs and few expectations. It is a common business strategy to aim for churn and not worry about the needs of long-term customers. Time will tell if that’s a correct decision, but meanwhile Ancestry is sure to lose much of its most dedicated customer base. It seems to be an industry trend. Take a look at the new design of 23andme, which is receiving a deservedly negative reaction. And don’t expect a change of heart. Even if the cash flow begins to decline, and it may not, management is going to be too invested in the perceived validity of their strategy to change course quickly. This is unlikely to be a New Coke scenario. Now I need to figure out what I can replace ancestry.com with, an unhappy task.

December 20: Looked at my tree, still ‘New Ancestry’… the nightmare continues.

I can’t even speak to New Ancestry issues mentioned by others like screen colors, errors, speed. I can’t get beyond the disgust of seeing ‘Life Story’ and its Ancestry-created text within my tree. Perhaps there are some who like the new functionality. I do not: I hate it. I feel like I owe an apology to all my long gone ancestors and kin for, in my opinion, the disrespect shown to their memorial profiles by their personal histories turned into elementary story stories containing irrelevant content. I didn’t ask for Life Story to deface their profiles, and unfortunately I can’t stop it from displaying as part of their profiles.

Ancestry Mgt: I call on you to give us a configuration setting that the tree owner can turn ‘Life Story’ on/off globally across all profiles within a tree. Have the person search results open to Facts instead (don’t even display the ‘tab’ Life Story if the configuration is set to ‘no’). Give me this way, or some way, to get inane Life Story function out of my tree.

Notice that I said ‘tree owner’. We created the trees, not Ancestry. We should have the right to determine what content is displayed within those trees, without Ancestry deciding what’s best within our trees.

Once I am able to get rid of Life Story I will at least then be able to fairly assess the other ‘New Ancestry’ changes. Will I love New Ancestry then? Doubtful. But there might be an opportunity to tolerate it.

Many people keep mentioning that New Ancestry is dumbed-down. However, it is only Life Story that is dumbed down to the point of totally trivializing the lives of our ancestors. The Facts page is not dumbed-down, but just the opposite. It is very cluttered, difficult to read (especially the age of the ancestor at the very left of the timeline) other than the enormous depressing dark gray name banner at the top…almost every feature requires extra clicks for those of us dinosaurs who use a desk- or lap top. Nothing is intuitive. Features, if you can find them, might work one day and not the next. Functions we took for granted are gone. The only “dumbed-down” part of the Facts page is how cartoonish it looks. I truly pity newbies who never had the chance to work first in “Old” Ancestry…New Ancestry has a much steeper learning curve, else why would Ancestry think we need so many “tutorials” to use it.
I could go on and on. The one thing that I want above all else right now though is the ability to hide or opt out of Life Story The only option I have right now is keeping my trees private, which certainly doesn’t help my DNA matches, but fewer and fewer of them even have a tree anymore themselves.

The new format for the Ancestry website has clear problems, as demonstrate by the majority of comments on this thread. Ancestry seems resistant to making simple changes which would help a lot. For example:
1) We need a button to turn off the map facility. The problems are endemic, from its insistence that everywhere is in the USA unless specifically told otherwise (and changing many entries for 10,000+ people in a tree is not possible).
2) The heart icon for place of marriage is not appropriate. Genealogists will know that many (most?) marriages in past ages were not love matches.
3) The whole “lifestory” section tends to turn genealogical fact into an interpretative fiction. The easiest solution would be a switch to turn it off.
4) “passed away” is the wrong term for “died” – it certainly doesn’t fit someone who died in battle or was executed or murdered.
5) Sort out your county designations (or stop automatically adding them). The UK city of Bristol was divided between two counties (not wholly in Gloucestershire as you seem to think) and is now in a third (Avon) – the correct designation is simply Bristol. London is not reasonably described as London, Middlesex. Designations like Cardiff, Glamorganshire, Wales, UK just look comical. The county is Gloucestershire, not Gloucester (which is a town). It is Kent not County Kent. The designation Northern Ireland, Ireland is wrong and politically sensitive. And so it goes on.
6) The pedigree view needs to work on all browsers. I can’t update my browser as my employer requires me to use an interface which is not compatible with the latest IE or similar.
7) Search headings need re-examining. It’s probably time we had Workhouse as a separate category (not hidden under Court). We badly need a place search which isn’t “exact” (so Reading, Berkshire, England will find records at present (because this is exact) but Reading will say there is nothing.)

Most of all the interface needs to take account the needs of genealogists who want to do a decent job with finding and presenting their family trees.

Has anyone called ancestry support recently? Just got off the phone with them. NO ETA on relationship calculator being broken. Seriously? this as been going on for DAYS. and, while on hold, their automatic message is flawed as it promotes the benefits of the new ancestry. Sort of feel sorry for those answering the phone as they are also victims of this flawed release. But, I want my relationship calculator back sooner rather than we have no idea.

Gee Kendall Hulet, are you helping to get relationship calculator back or are you on some vacation somewhere. and just think, this is only 1 of the issues that has members leaving the fold. Get it together and get this fixed!!!

I find this screamingly funny….
We wanted to make sure the new Ancestry website is a site our members love to use even more than the current experience. The new experience incorporates a new look and feel and simplified navigational elements to streamline key tasks – making your family story the focus. All of the changes are anchored in three underlying principles that are the driving force for our design team:

As we work our way through the changes, has anyone noticed the SHOEBOX feature is now almost non-existent? As best I can tell, it works only if saving an already saved record from your tree. In that case, you can go to that record that has been saved to someone else and save it again to PERSON – SOMEONE ELSE – SHOEBOX. This is the only time a SHOEBOX option will come up for me.

When trying to do the same with a record I am viewing from another venue, the SHOEBOX option is not there.

For example, If a record comes up in a HINT for a person on whose profile I am working, my only options are YES – NO – MAYBE. The MAYBE being the only logical possiblity of SHOEBOX, I find MAYBE only takes the record from view and puts it in the UNDECIDED block at the top to the page. If I need it – say several people later – I have to remember who I was working on and that a record has been set aside – and then go back and find it. In my opinon, this renders the whole MAYBE status realtively useless. It is just as well to FORGET MAYBE and leave the record in the HINT status until you can go back for it.

The SHOEBOX feature also does not seem to be available when locating a record via the SEARCH method from the top toolbar – which, incidentally, now mostly yields a mush of useless records. Again, whatever option comes up does NOT include SHOEBOX.

The availability of SHOEBOX should be the same from all venues – a record already in my tree – a record that come up under hints – and a record that is located via search. I fear this is another example that the people who designed segments of the new web site either did not have a good understanding of needed tools and function , did not communicate well with each other, or both. Hope Ancestry takes notice and makes this repair.

Well, you have successfully made changes that do not make sense. One feature you took away was the “relationship to user or person picked to be the head. I found it to be useful to determine if I was going to add a record or not. I don’t like having people who are not in my direct line ie “father inlaw to husband of great aunt:” its helped me

I want OLD Ancestry back. I am certainly paying enough through yearly subscription to at least have a choice. I tried New Ancestry some months ago and did not like it at all. Don’t like anything about it. I switched back to the old site. Now I find that the option “Old Ancestry” is no longer on the drop down menu so I seem to be stuck with this new site. I want the old one back. After being a member for many years I am now looking for another site to research my family.

Okay, in the famous words of President Reagan, “Here we go again”! I had written to ACOM support to point out the inappropriateness of claiming that people who, at one point were born in Austria or Germany , were born in the Czech Republic. Here is the reply that I received today: “In the new Ancestry website, we automatically generate descriptions for certain events that help enrich the family stories you have already written…..The underlying issue has to do with one of the long-lived challenges of computerized genealogy.” So, with other words we have to accommodate the computer even if this then turns the data to incorrect data, because the data in my trees was EXTREMELY accurate and about as precise as it can be, but the computer program decided to zero in on what I had written in parenthesis in my notes, wher I indicated what these villages are called today and in what country these villages are today as opposed to when my ancestors were born. And, the answer misses the point we are all making: If we do not want an automatically generated computer program to alter the data (and no matter how much ACOM tries to argue that it does not alter the data..it does) we have in our tree, we should have the right to block this “enhancement” so that neither we nor our guests get to see it. I have seen a half a dozen people write in and say that they LOVE having LifeStories. A part of me feels very sorry for them, because–even if this “enhancement” comes out accurately in their tree, no one with a developed intellect can possibly consider it an “enhancement” to their tree unless they have one sorry tree!!

…Oh, …oh! I forgot the punch line in an attempt to keep my message short. The e-mail I received from ACOM support says “With the site upgrade, locations change automatically according to what is GEOLOGICALLY CORRECT TODAY.” and then it went on to talk about the challenges of computerized genealogy. So “enhanced history” adapts itself to what is “geologically correct today”. Some historical “enhancement” that is!!!

I am making my Public Tree of over 30,000 relationships Private as of today. On Monday, I will get my credit card removed from your site. I am getting in touch with MyHeritage to see what their pages look like. If Classic Ancestry isn’t back within 30 days, I will not renew after 12 years. This site just makes me angry.

Here’s a prediction…. Ancestry mgt will, in a bit, come forth saying that they have heard the customer, heard the wants for old Ancestry. And, being the ‘customer focused’ company that it is (HA HA, what a joke), they will bring back old Ancestry as an optional PREMIUM service, available at an additional expense. (if they try that one, and think they have seen a disgruntled customer base up to now, they haven’t seen anything like they will then!)

Monika, I have just read you previous message – more than once – to make sure I read what I read. And I did “With the site upgrade, locations change automatically according to what is GEOLOGICALLY CORRECT TODAY.” Does Ancestry think that all of its customers are “thick” by making such a statement!! I may be a retired vehicle mechanic, but I thought that GEOLOGY was connected to rocks and the like, and GEOGRAPHY was connected to countries etc.

This “new” and “improved” website is ruining my experience of genealogy and what was my hobby. I’m sick of it. I’m tired of trying, and not finding enjoyment in what I’d created. It gives me little solace to know so many other customers feel the very same way. I hope the people who thought this (change) was acceptable are satisfied. I’m sure your revenue will reflect the discontent amongst your customer base. The whole thing makes me ill, and I feel helpless to do anything about it. You could never refund me back all the hours of labor and love put into my tree even if I say goodbye.

I am not liking your new website. I have been a member for a very long time and have paid a lot of money for your services. Please let us have the choice into opting in or out of the new ancestry… It is not right that we have to change because you say so.. You are going to lose a lot of subscribers with this. I have found out that I am getting multiple entries for the same people. This is happening on the new system.
All your system really is to you is a money maker. We have put tons of hours and made our family trees with love and respect for our ancestors. Please do not take that away from us.

Since they have our goods in the cloud, they should be able to allow us to get a full GEDCOM of our trees so that we can safely retain our data…and quietly go elsewhere and quit antagonizing us. We just copy all the comments and complaints from all the blogs dealing with this and when someone asks about Ancestry, just roll out the carts of documentation and tell them to pick a notebook, open it any place and just read for themselves. Since I can no longer access all of my entries due to loss, distortion, and the lack of available linkage…I’m being robbed…and so are you.

@Paul: You read this correctly. If you read any of my earlier posts, my tree states accurately that my ancestors were born in Bohemia when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This territory was also German territory since the 12th Century. Yet ACOM’s LifeStories ignores that and insists that my ancestors (who most likely did not speak one word of Czech) were born in the Czech Republic. I have complained about that since August. When I complained about that again this week, forwarding specific Profile pages to ancestry, this was their reply. The exact quote: “With the site upgrade, locations change automatically according to what is geologically correct today.” I assume that the overwhelmed person who responded to my e-mail meant to say “geographically”… but we will never know for sure! 🙂
@Mike D. All our minds go to a different place as we are frustrated about this experience. My take on this is that ACOM notified its members about them not continuing to support FTM after a certain date, approximately two weeks before Christmas, and that ACOM changed its members over to New Ancestry on December 15 due to the fact that they were hoping we would be so busy getting ready for Christmas that a large percentage of its members would not take the time to complain at his time of the year. (And many people may find themselves in exactly this situation.) I believe that is why this is all happening right now, but then, what do I know!

I too am not re-newing my membership….it is so frustrating after all my years of research to find it tampered with and I will now make my tree private and look elsewhere. Why oh why did mgmt think this was a good idea? This is the biggest fraud ever and we are upset users who pay over $300 a year……I do think this is a scam perpetuated by Kendall Hulet et al…..we dedicated researchers are upset and will not put up with this new ancestry. Totally a waste of time and I am going to ck and see if my photos have been removed as others have stated. How dare you change anything on my tree.

DO NOT DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR ORDER FTM 2014–after 2 attempts to D’L this program from the online version and having problem after problem–I decided to wait for the disc thinking it would work THIS time and being a cleaner install–after waiting 6 hours, my computer dinged as if there was an error–I had done EVERTHING -cust svc recommeded–took down firewalls, took down virus controlsp–THEN after waiting for 6+ hours for program to D/L (for the 3rd time) My cimputer dinged as if there were an error and the D/L of my tree had stopped –so I poked around looking at media etc anbd it told ne 11 changes had occurred and wanted me to sync—since I havde not made any changes this worried me—it told me 11 change swere made and did I want to SYNC–I said NO as I had NO idea what changes it was going to make and with 10,000 ppl in my tree and about 4000 media documents I just was not going to take a chance–i HOPE these people did not mess up my tree–I immedetially deactivated my SYNC…as the program did not even disclose what changes had been made—I have 15 years of research and tons of things I would need to re-research if this was messing up my tree…Years ago when this came out the reviews on amaxon scared me so I never bought it….finally with Ancestry’s do or die date I decided to do it…

THIS program is fraught with problems and if you have not bought it yet I highly recommend you don’t….this has been a weekelong nightmre waiting for 6+ hours for it to download…andnow I an scared to death they have messed up my tree—Iam NOT a tree copier—every single person in my tree is well documented…

I am livid over all the misfinformation I have gotten from customer service and hope I can get a refund for the $70 more so I paid for this DANGEROUS program (with disc) …NOW I don’t even know what errors it may have created–STAY AWAY from 2014 if you have a big tree–mine has taken me 15+ years to create —I did not want this program after reading various reviews –but did finaly try x 3 after ancestry’s “do ir die” date…

If they have created errors in my tree it will taken me forever to find them.

SORRY FOR THE TYPOS– I am LIVID about the time I have wasted and also the possibilty they have screwd up my tree—NOT TO MENTION TO 20 OR MORE PAGES I HAVE OPEN IN MOZILLA I WAS CURRENTLY WORKING ON WHICH IT TOTALLY ERASED WHEH I TRIED TO LOOK AT A DOCUMENT–STEER CLEAR FOLKS!

@ELHURA, thanks, nothing working, and now the relationship went bye-bye too. LOL. Thought I would be smart and start downloading ancestry hints (documents etc) Nada. You have to cut and paste to save them. They surely have it covered. @ CHERYL, did the petition. Found it on Facebook. Everyone should. Doubt it will work, but……… BTW, Ancestry.com on FB said it is my browser. Oh, Lord, they have been using that excuse for the past 6 years with every change they make. Cant be their fault. Hey? I hate leaving Ancestry, have made great relationships and met family I never would have before, but, it is just becoming a fiasco.

Just trying to send feedback in as many places as possible, so, maybe you’ll make the necessary corrections to the really, inarticulate, sloppy “LifeStory” feature, so all of your users don’t look like total idiots. I’m done being livid.

FYI, “LifeStory” interprets all CITY Sources and turns them into COUNTY. For example, all of my relatives living at the turn of the 20th century lived in Baltimore City. The Source material I have for hundreds of timeline entries are from CITY directories, and the FACT page clearly indicates that the Source material is a CITY source, and that these people lived in a CITY, yet, in “LifeStory” all of those timeline entries for these relatives says they lived in Baltimore COUNTY. That’s a really big flaw, that I can’t even imagine how was programmed incorrectly.

FYI, “LifeStory” will not let you edit pictures out of a particular timeline entry. The FACT page for my Great Uncle has one picture for his DEATH. I attached one picture of his death certificate, and that’s all I want. The FACT page for this Great Uncle also has 9 pictures which I attached purposefully attached for his BURIAL. This is all CORRECT on the FACT page and just how I intended his page to look. BUT, “LifeStory” has randomly taken some of the pictures that were attached to BURIAL in the FACT section and put them under DEATH in “LifeStory” and then repeats them in BURIAL in “LifeStory”, also. It’s redundant, inappropriate, and isn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want burial pictures under death, just under burial, but, apparently I have no choice in “LifeStory.” I tried, but, it is NOT possible to edit pictures out of a timeline subject in “LIFESTORY.” I tried multiple times to edit out the pictures by clicking on it and having it disappear and then SAVE. When it refreshes the pictures are back. Apparently you can only edit words. It’s like my whole tree has been hijacked but the really awful “LifeStory” feature, and just about everything it tries to interpret from the FACT page is incorrect!!!

FYI, “LifeStory” doesn’t recognize the suffix at the end of a person’s name. My grandfather was Sr. & my father was a Jr. and it doesn’t pick that up. Each person’s name stops at the comma after their last name. RIDICULOUS!!!

@Nancy. My Lifestory is recognizing suffixes that I’d rather it didn’t. I have been using the suffix field for various things because it’s searchable. So I get “John Jones QUAKER married Mary Smith MAYFLOWER.” Only Ancestry could find a way to make us both unhappy! 🙂

I found Ancestry when I was still pretty new to genealogy and really liked the site, but the “new” Ancestry is not an improvement in any way I have found yet. I am not against change when it’s for the better. We are constantly upgrading applications where I work and it’s not a matter of learning the changes on the “new” version. I tried to use it on and off before I was forced to, but most of it is just, well silly…that is the only word I can think of to describe it. I see many comments from unhappy customers on many forums, so I hope you will be taking a serious look at all the feedback.

I’m not a person who usually posts on blogs so this shows how strongly I feel about New Ancestry. When I started researching my family trees years ago I was advised to buy a subscription to Ancestry which a friend assured me was the best genealogical website around. But not now! I became a keen Ancestry user, often on a daily basis, because it was easy and intuitive to use. I wasn’t particularly happy with recent changes such as getting rid of Old Search and other inconvenient changes to functionality but I learnt to put up with them. But New Ancestry is so user-unfriendly that try as I may I doubt that I will ever be happy to spend a lot of my time on it. I often work on Ancestry for hours at a time but New Ancestry is just plain ugly. The colours are too harsh and working on the screens is actually uncomfortable. On the profile screen, the large gloomy banner is far too big in contrast to the tiny font used for ages in the timeline, the layout is cluttered, there are too many boxes and the sources in the middle column are too intrusive. The family tree screen with the sickly pink and blue on dark gray is so horrible to look at. It’s hard to imagine who thought it would be attractive. As for the dreadful Lifestory with its patronizing, puerile additions, I’m doing my best to ignore it.

New Ancestry is not intuitive, links are hard to find, the use of pop ups is slow and tedious, and useful functionality has been removed. The tendency of Ancestry’s programmers towards more and more clicks and scrolling has now gone mad. It’s now necessary to click twice to get into any editing mode. And you have to be so careful if you to another screen to copy data when editing in all the pop-ups because if you don’t click back in the right place on the screen the pop up disappears taking all your carefully entered data with it. Functionality has declined seriously with the loss of many features present in Classic Ancestry. I can’t find features that were important to me such as the ‘Search the web’ button which I was told upon enquiry has been discarded. Why get rid of something that worked and was useful?

So, I’ve cancelled my subscription. Unless the option to use Classic Ancestry is restored or New Ancestry is seriously revised, I won’t be renewing it. I love genealogy and devote much of my spare time to it but I won’t pay for a program that I don’t enjoy using. I’m at a loss to understand why some of the massive amount of money that must have been spent to create this backward step wasn’t used to correct existing problems such as improving the appalling indexing. I’ve lost count of the hundreds of corrections I’ve submitted for badly indexed records so that other researchers could find them.

Ancestry may be after new users but they will quickly get frustrated or bored and depart. That just leaves the serious researchers whom Ancestry clearly is no longer interested in retaining. So who will they be left with?

I think the new site is Horrible! I tried to change it back like I could before and now I can’t. There are many people who still want the old one. We are the one paying for this service. You should make both available. I have belonged to Ancestry for years, but I may just chose not to be any longer.

I absolutely HATE the new look, I HATE the new features, i.e., the time line that showed up when I pulled up an ancestory on my family trees, etc. of Ancestry. I have removed all of the family tree’s that I had on Ancestry, and my membership that comes up for renewal in April has already been cancelled. I will not be coming back to the new Ancestry as it is really horrible!!!!!!

This is ONE example of how HORRIBLE the search results and Suggested Records have become:

When viewing the 1869 MISSOURI marriage record for HENRY DIXON and AMANDA JONES the Suggested Records include a marriage record for NATHANIEL TILDEN born in 1583!!! 300 YEARS EARLIER! Also, a CALIFORNIA birth record for CHARLES ANDERSON born in 1967, a 1970 NEVADA marriage record for BRUCE HOWE & MARY KARKI, and a bunch of other COMPLETELY UNRELATED BS, WTF?!!

I’m starting to think the people running this site are a bunch of sadists who are getting some kind of sick pleasure out of watching us suffer!

I’m trying to get used to the new format — but I still HATE it!! Everytime I open my tree, it opens to the full tree rather than the profile page that I had been previously working on. Also, in old ancestry, I used to be able to see five of the photos that I added, now I can only see one unless I open the “Gallery”. Definitely not an improvement.

I used to be able to use the Ancestry website with a browser on my iPad without issue. I currently am unable to review record hints since button appears broken. The mostly lame app allows me, but it does not have the same comprehensive capability (compared to each other, not the prior version of the website). When you force a big change like this on your customers, fix the mistakes during the beta cycle.

For everybody who is having problems with the new version of this site, email your problems to support@ancestry.com Even if you just copy your posts from this blog and paste them into an email. There are already over 700 posts.

I think that will make some “noise” that will get their attention. I’m not confident anyone reads the posts on this blog much. They don’t seem to respond to any of our complaints. Flood them with emails.

I don’t use all the features on the site so I have fewer problems, but I haven’t checked all my people. Maybe I will come up with some that are just waiting for me.

Just to make you smile. I looked at the tree I had created for my husband. When his great-grandmother died, her great-grandfather married a woman by the name of Dorothy. That is all I know about her, except for her birth date that was mentioned in a Census record. It is all I care to know about her. I do not know her maiden name, nor do I know who her parents were. So, I left the space blank where the parents are normally listed. Went to read her LifeStory and it reads: :Dorothy was born on October 26, 1900 in Nebraska, the child of her mother.” Oh, thank you so much ACOM for enhancing the stories in my family trees. It is good to know that Dorothy was the child of her mother!!! Is it really MY job to have to edit this crap???

This may be New Ancestry, but it certainly is not an Improved Ancestry. You should be embarrassed at releasing this software. First, what purpose is there in moving all the functions around to new locations? This is like switching to a whole new software product. There has been a huge learning curve, even though I have been using Ancestry almost daily for five years. Secondly, the response time to open a source document is about twice as long as it used to be. You obviously have added something in the background to cause slower response times.

Many actions which used to be done with one click of the mouse now take two or three; for example to go from the Profile view to the Pedigree view now takes two clicks instead of one because now you must first go to the Tree view in order to get to the Pedigree view. Hovering the mouse over a person’s profile to see the core info no longer works; you have to open the profile, then click backwards to get to where you were. When I want to save a source record to my tree, I now first must affirm that “this record match[es] the person in your tree” before I am allowed to save the source document. What the hell is that for? Then to close the source, it takes two clicks instead of one. Everything has become way more tedious and time consuming.

Old Ancestry gave us the option to save unknown parents or spouses to our tree when they were identified in hints. Not any more, now I have to jot down the new names and create new people, then do another records search to add the same data. If there was a conflict in dates between a hint and the data already in the profile, Old Ancestry used to give us to option to modify the profile. Not any more. For example, a marriage hint with a different date is now saved as a duplicate marriage between the same people with different dates. So now I had to go in and delete one marriage as well as modifying the date. More unnecessary steps to perform.

I do not like having the source documents included in the gallery, but I finally discovered today how to filter that out. It is not very intuitive. For people before the age of photography, I save short vignettes when I can find them as their default profile “photo”. That option is no longer available, as far as I can tell. Despite spending 20 minutes searching the Help, I still have not found how to change the existing default photo for a person to a different one. Working with the Gallery has become a real mess.

Ancestry, you have a lot of work to do to make this a product that I would recommend. I HATE what you have done to Old Ancestry. I have been a loyal user for five years despite your price increases and incompetent help desk support, because I love the on-line search capability and instant integration to the tree. Microsoft had to release major software updates to Windows 8 and 10 to fix their screw-ups, and I will be expecting the same from you to fix what you trashed. My current subscription expires in April. I doubt I will renew it if you have not addressed this by then.

I won’t even comment again about the Life Story functionality, except to say: Ancestry Mgt – GET IT OUT OF MY TREE!

Let’s consider the Facts tab layout. The old format was quietly dignified, a memorial to the profile it was detailing. The primary photo was nicely sized, and the information on the screen nicely formatted, text sizes appropriate. One could see the events, sources, parents, spouses, the siblings, and ways to update the Facts.

Let’s look at the new Facts tab. The primary photo has been reduced in size and placed in a box that makes it look like it had said ‘stick picture here’. The old picture had no artificial box around it so whatever sized picture was used, it looked as if it was the perfect size. The new way with the box mostly often makes the picture look poorly. The primary picture and profile heading looks more like a rap sheet now.

The ‘Sources’ column is oversized and misplaced in relationship to more important information as parents, spouses, and siblings (which one must click on even to see). Who put this in the middle of the page???? Yes the information is the same as the old format but there is NO dignity to it. It looks mechanical, versus being a memorial to the person.

I kept wondering, what were they (Ancestry) thinking when they designed ‘New Ancestry? I think now more, were they thinking at all? What was the intent? This is the best they could do aesthetically IF a functional redesign was needed? I think not, nothing this bad could have been the only option.

Notice that I haven’t touched on the quality of the data in New Ancestry, or the speed, etc. I haven’t been able to get past the visual damage that has been done.

Oh, and by the way, perhaps it is related, when looking at my mobile Ancestry app, that is screwed up too, again with unwanted Life Story events not related to the person, and placed incorrectly in timelines.

@Monika… yes it did make me smile, I found it hilarious!
“Dorothy was born on October 26, 1900 in Nebraska, the child of her mother.” Oh, thank you so much ACOM for enhancing the stories in my family trees. It is good to know that Dorothy was the child of her mother!!! ”

I don’t always research an entire family in some of my trees, so the same problem occurs when the generated story says something like …
“they had one child during their marriage”…

@Monika …. yes, that did make me smile – I found it hilarious!
I don’t always research the entire family on one of my trees, so I’m getting something like
“They had one child during their marriage”……… Err – no, in fact they had 3 sons!

Good Morning. I have only been a member for 3 years, and in that time I have learned MUCH. I have learned the hard way, about “Junk” trees, and have learned to Value the research and help from the “Pros”, and I say “THANK YOU” very much. I do NOT like the NEW Ancestry, I always returned to the OLD Ancestry, and have spent so many hours on. Now it would seem that so many are either going “Private”, or dropping out altogether, our greatest source is leaving. I myself do not enjoy logging on in the morning like I did, it is now very frustrating. Going along with the New Ancestry’s “Life Story” thing, I will close with, David was born 1n 1952 in Detroit, Mich. and he may have met Henry Ford (Picture), David lived just fine without Ancestry from 1952 until 2013. David will live just fine without Ancestry from 2016 till his end.

Looking across just 7 of the blogs connected to “New” Ancestry, and FTM, there are in excess of 11,200 comments. The overwhelming majority are negative towards these changes, some forcefully so!!

But are the powers that be in Ancestry listening?? I very much doubt it – they are just leaving the PBI who answer the phones and read the e-mails to take the hits of our “annoyance” at what they are doing and have already done.

Have any of the Executives even seen these comments? If they have, have they got the courage (not the word I first thought of) to come out of the Board room and answer us – in a “plain English” fashion?

Listen to us; Ancestry, for once in your corporate lives!!! You want our membership money – fine; provide what is being asked for and the greater number of us will continue to pay.

But, sadly, it looks as though your “takings” are going to be down over the next year because you send out the signal that you don’t really care about what we think; just as long as the annual/pay monthly/pay as you go money keeps arriving in the Corporate Bank – YOU DON’T CARE ONE JOT.

I won’t be the only one to have noticed how few posts there are from Ancestry itself on these blogs. Any that there have been mainly re-direct us to other blogs, forums, webinars, etc.

“We really do appreciate your feedback” is above the box where we enter our comments!! Do you?? If you do then show us. Show us that you have heard us, show us you have taken it all on board.

I’m another one who truly dislikes the “NEW AND IMPROVED” Ancestry site. The older interface was much easier to user. You’ve taken an interface that was quite comfortable to learn and use into a monster. The NEW Ancestry was not well thought out, it’s been pieced together. You started the Beta as a shell, stripping it of any real usefulness, it was only through user input that many of the functions were added back in. I’m all for changes for the better, more records, better transcription, maybe adding an option to export a branch of the tree, an option to expert a GED with all media,etc. (Options we have in FTM). However like most others here, I haven’t seen any changes for the better and you’ve taken a useful product and totally destroyed it. The new ancestry is a lot more work and it has nothing to do with a learning curve. Profile view has gone from a clean interface to something to something from hell. Don’t need or want life story, totally useless. Also like a few others I now have more browser crashes. I use FTM as well, the main reason was because of the integration with the site.

I have downloaded the app, OK to view a tree but can’t see it ever becoming a very useful tool for serious research. You’ve tried to turn Ancestry.com a social media experience and have failed miserably. Researching your roots is not a social media event nor should it be.

Skimming over the feedback, my thoughts have been repeated over and over again. The first thing I most dislike is the color scheme…..like someone thought “let’s make this look like an old photo album” would enhance your tree experience. I find the color scheme completely dreary and inappropriate. It is dull and uninviting. I find myself wanting to search anywhere else on the internet rather than on Ancestry. That’s BAD, isn’t it?! I’ve been a faithful customer since 2002. I’ve hardly used Ancestry since you’ve crammed the “new” Ancestry down our throats. I also miss the relationship calculator. Where did it go?! It was useful. Also, the history lessons added to the Lifestory – who suggested that? While the idea may be helpful to some, I feel it is just clutter. I don’t want to see it ever. I can’t comment on anything more at the moment, because I am uninspired to spend more time on you site. Think about these comments from all who have taken the time to write. I can’t believe these changes got as far as they did without anyone at Ancestry standing up to say “Hey, what we have isn’t broke – let’s just tweak, maybe.” I’m afraid I will also be reconsidering the renewal of my subscription. I’m just not at all happy with the changes, nor do I like the fact that you have taken away the option to stay with the old look. In my opinion, this is/was a huge blunder!

Tell me how this will work for the people who have FTM and use the local library’s Ancestry.com for research? For several years (5 or More) I have been teaching FTM and many of those I teach have not the resources for subscriptions to ancestry. Perhaps in your corporate wisdom you have a solution, yes?? Is that respectful enough?

I concur with almost all the comments made about the staggeringly awful new website. But what really gets my goat is that Ancestry haven’t even got the balls to put any sort of reply/comment up to their loyal customers who have taken the time to put their point of view. You would have thought they would at least try and placate those who are upset. It’s the normal story of businesses being totally customer centric when starting out and completely the opposite when they get to a certain size. Arrogance – The utter arrogance is beyond belief.

I agree with the negative comments above. I worked for a corporation that was bought by people who knew nothing about the product (chemicals) and proceeded to trash the business. This seems to be another example of the same process. It seems that Ancestry wants to appeal to fly-by-night instant-gratification types who are not serious researchers but just want to play around without doing any boring work. The dumbing down of genealogy. I am so glad I never got hooked on FTM and online trees. I am a TMG user, so I know the pain of losing a software product, but here is a corporation that could be excellent and is slowly committing suicide.

I was just on ancestry.co.uk checking something on one of my trees when a survey popped up. I had great fun doing it and left them in no doubt about what I thought of the new site. I also contacted the support team by email and told them the same. When will anyone from Ancestry actually reply to all these complaints?

The new system is cumbersome and quirky would have thought that most of the quirks would have been worked out of it before the switch had to be made. It appears that most of the people commenting are not to happy with Ancestry at the present time

I thought I was done commenting; now it seems I have new reason to be outraged. Realizing that ancestry.com has my credit card information saved, I attempted to delete it. Guess what? You can go online and change your card to a different card, but you can’t delete it. Of course there is no link provided to send a request to anyone but you are told you can call and speak with someone.
This morning I did call and explain that I wanted my credit card information deleted. The person I got took some time trying to figure this out and eventually told me – get this – MY CREDIT CARD CANNOT BE DELETED FROM THEIR SYSTEM. And further, the explanation she was given for this was that it was for “tax purposes.”
As I explained in my e-mail sent to customersolutions@ancestry.com other companies give customers the option to save or not save their credit card information, and there seem to be no tax consequences to them. Sounds like another convenient made-up excuse to placate what they obviously think are very dumb customers. I suggest other people who object to their credit card numbers being stored (as well as those who object to the system of ONLY allowing auto-renewal of subscriptions, and how many people end up renewing by mistake because they forgot to cancel?) make their voices heard.

Classic case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The new ancestry is much less user friendly. Ancestry leadership: it is not about the LOOK; it is about functionality and improving the database of records.

I am thoroughly upset with the elimination of the Family Tree desktop program and absolutely disgusted with the new Ancestry.com. I worked the website on people I KNEW should be on Ancestry, but I had to try all my 30 years of investigative tricks of the trade to find them. Your upgrade is actually a downgrade. My renewal comes up in March, and I will have to reconsider renewing at that time.

Kendall: How can you possibly title your blog “All Members Are Now Moving to the New Ancestry”?? You make it sound like everyone is in love with it and are moving for that reason. In reality you know perfectly well that we had no choice as you scrapped the old, and far superior, Ancestry. Of the 728 comments you have permitted to be posted so far, I have only been able to find 3 positive ones (.04%). That should tell you something. Your blog should have been titled “All Members Are Now Forced To Move to the New Ancestry”.

Following is content from an email I sent to Ancestry support this AM. Coincidentally I see from a later post that that user found a survey on the UK site, so why not in the US?
——
Many of us within the customer base feel Ancestry mgt is not listening to our concerns about New Ancestry. In fairness, perhaps our concerns do not reflect the majority.
While it should have been done long ago, I would suggest Ancestry management survey all Ancestry.com customers as of 12/1/2015, regarding New Ancestry. The survey could be done through the Ancestry website, or emailed to customers. One survey per customer. This would not be a Vote, but a survey to determine how all interested customers feel about New Ancestry.
This should only be done if:
•Ancestry mgt agrees to publish the results, raw, without manipulation, online perhaps with the blog section. Ideally the survey would be done by an outside firm to demonstrate somewhat neutrality and non-interference by Ancestry mgt.
•The survey is for non-Ancestry employees ONLY, even if there are employees with trees.
•The complete survey results are published, showing the results for each survey question broken done by time as an Ancestry.com customer. For example, Customer Groups: Less than 2 years, 2-5, 6-10, 11-20, over 20. (Ancestry should be able determine the longevity rather than asking the customer.) And I would hope Ancestry mgt would consider the long term customers opinions more highly.
•Ancestry management honestly uses the results as an educational process to identify needs for change.

Possible Categories with the survey, and possible things to survey about:
Life Story: Fumctionality, colors, accuracy, layout, font, and whether the functionality as part of their tree is wanted at all
Facts: Fumctionality, colors, accuracy, layout, font, primary photo size and layout
Search: Speed, accuracy of results, usability
(etc: all functions to be surveyed individually like the above)

Finally, there should be a question, “how do you feel about New Ancestry”, on a 0-10 scale perhaps, ‘Hate it’ to ‘Love It’
——–
I would hope Ancestry mgt follows the suggestion and solicits the opinions of ALL of us. The only reasons that I can think of not to do it is (1) they might not like the results and/or (2) they don’t care what we in the user group think about New Ancestry.

I am now noticing someone is paying attention in management and the trees now how some things back that were there before. I just did a fresh new search of an ancestor and sourced it with Mayflower births and deaths records, Vol 1 and 2. The person was added in to the tree, which was good, however, they were added in as “female”. So I did change him to “male”. Good so far. But the “relationship to me” shows “sister-in-law of 2nd cousin 7x removed”. UPDATE. I refreshed the browser and now it is showing correctly as “brother-in-law of 2nd cousin 7x removed”. We used to have a function here, that needs to be returned, where you click on the “relationship indicator” at the top of the persons name and it will update right then, instead of having to refresh the browser.

After all these years of buying every new FTM and paying $300/year for Ancestry, you go and throw me to the wolves. I want a database on my computer.
I know, you’ll say this is some few hundred out of 13 million. I think you will find this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I guess my next move is to go to Legacy.

I HATE the new Ancestry.com. Among other things, I can’t make notes. With the old Ancestry, I could make notes; for instance, -4 Jane Brown DU, means I could tell at a glance that Jane Brown was my 4th great-grandmother, Dad’s side of the family, via the Underwoods. Please give up this ‘new and improved’ version of Ancestry.com and let us go back to what we all signed up for and what we paid good money for!

What the crap! I stay so confused on this mess that I don’t even know what I’m confused about! I feel like I’ve just been thrown out into the middle of the ocean and told to start swimming for Australia …. I can’t find anything, when I do get on the right path it doubles back and I end up nowhere. … Used to I could sign in and be so happy and relaxed, now I just want to throw my tablet across the room. I imagine most of your customers are older, like I am, with a touch of arthritis, and all the extra clicking and hand movements to navigate now are extremely tiring … The old site was worked out to a science, simple, simple, simple … Ever heard if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?!?!?!?!?

“This is my cousin George”??? A TV commercial about someone finding they are related to George Washington? Ancestry, that is a bad idea for a TV commercial! You are going to have everyone that sees that commercial thinking they will find “cousin George” in their tree!

Trishbc: I laughed out loud when I read your post. A lot of folks are really funny. I know it’s a very serious situation, though. I have been through those same feelings. I’m at a point where I’m a little bit more relaxed. But I don’t use most of the features on this site. No media, stories, or pictures. I don’t use FTM so no synchronizing. So I hope people are not offended when I find some levity in their posts. I do understand. I don’t like the new site!

Life Story is a joke. Every time you add a record, or change a date, or add a person you will have to go check it to see what it screwed up. No thanks. I can write my own stories! I never want to see the whole family’s BMD events in the Fact column. I will never use the historical insights. In fact I don’t use half of what is on the site. I use mostly records. If it doesn’t get included in a GEDCOM, it doesn’t go on Ancestry.

I just came home from our local FHC using the institutional version of Ancestry plus other databases they have. There was a survey request regarding the new Ancestry. I responded but I don’t know if it got sent. I don’t have such a request on my home Ancestry.

Just reading a Lifestory of my relative living in London in 1904, aged 29. The huge picture is entitled “Signing Of The Entente Cordiale” with the text “Edwin James xxxxxx may have worried that the signing of the Entente Cordiale meant the end of England’s period of isolation and prosperity”.
This is just pathetic.
But I suppose if it helps Permira grab an extra $700m if they ever do sell this mess of a website to some sucker, then there you go!
Only the other day I uncovered a letter from this relative declaring that he was extremely worried about the Entente Cordiale and felt that his prosperity was now in jeopardy.
Hilarious, if I wasn’t paying nearly £200 for the privilege.

The “New” Ancestry pretty much sucks! Hard to navigate and the “story telling” format is of no real value other than to amateurs. Think you need to take a careful look at your revenue model and don’t throw Ancestry’s reliable older generation customers under the bus, instead of gong after the millennials for whom genealogy is really of very little interest!

It appears to me that the real problem here is that Ancestry views their website, its content and FTM as just a business from which to make a profit. To us , their customers, our ancestors lives and their life stories have real meaning and are very personal. Ancestry really doesn’t have much appreciation for all the hours of effort we, their members apply to our research. Kendall Hulet states that ancestry has extensively researched members’ wants and needs. Well I for one wasn’t asked and I have been an ancestry member for many years. If members were asked now there is no doubt that we would all vote to have our classic trees returned and the ridiculous life stories which are full of inaccuracies removed. Ancestry has tried to be too clever with this new feature and it hasn’t got the ability to do it correctly and so it shouldn’t be done at all.
I have tried my hardest to get my tree as accurate as possible over the years and I was absolutely horrified when I viewed a few of the lifestories on my tree. My father served in Malaya during the Malayan conflict. Ancestry lifestory has states that he served in Campeche, Mexico and Centre, France. He never served in either of these countries so why did ancestry make up this information. I am heartbroken that my fathers’ information is incorrect.
My grandfathers military information on life story states that he served in Ontario. He never went to Ontario during his lifetime. It also states that ‘In 1911 he may have become a member of The Scout Association’. He was never in the scouts. What is the point in ancestry making up things that my grandfather might have done?
My great grandfathers lifestory states that the Great Depression of 1873-1896 affected him. How do you know that fact? My great grandfather was not employed in manufacturing or agriculture. He was a prison warder.
You really have no right to tamper with my tree and enter incorrect information about my ancestors. I am devastated by your actions. And as if that’s not enough you have also pulled the plug on FTM which I have been using for years.
Please put this right ancestry. Delete the life stories, bring back the classic site and continue to support your members with FTM. Do the right thing for your members.

I hated the new ancestry but after spending time learning how to use it, I love it. When FTM came out with about Version 8 or 9, I was sick of buying a new version every year so I switched to Legacy family tree. If you haven’t tried, it is well worth trying. Shortcut keys make it easy to type without constantly using the mouse, it creates great reports and updates are free until the next version comes out (which is not every year…about every 3-4 years). There is a free version on their website. Rather than complain here (which will not change anything), try new things…you may find something you like better than “the old”. 🙂 Just suggestion. I love LEGACY FAMILY TREE program

I’ve started the transition. Trees becoming private and unsearchable. Contemplating whether to extend for another 6 months or to cancel (fortunately the credit card number on file is now dead). FTM support going away is utter folly for anyone remotely serious about their trees. Ten months for a beta cycle that results in worse product at the end would spell doom for product managers at any other high-tech company I worked for. Even the initial comments announcing the beta were filled with warnings about keeping the existing functionality and fix the existing bugs before messing with stuff. Glad that customer feedback was considered…

Have just about had it for the day. The purple ink “bleeding” all over the page is the last straw. It is distracting, has to be removed to comfortably continue working and is slow to respond to clicks to send it away – only to be back “in-your-face” at the next click of the cursor. The only thing just a bit less distracting is the “creepy-crawly” Facts page each time your cursor hovers over a fact block, surrounding the block with a popup line and a glaring Edit button. Too much over the top, Ancestry! A work page WITHOUT these features is desperately needed.

I have to say that I don’t much care for some of the features in new Ancestry . Life story for example adds erroneous information to a family tree that I have meticulously researched. I would like the option to disable this completely. I like to have people comment on my tree and I do not want this feature removed. I also would like a dropdown box to a list of all people in my tree put on the profile page. Why oh why have all my pictures and certificates disappeared from my ancestors profiles? I put them in because I wanted them in there! This is not a step forward by any means. And what has happened to the relationship to me feature? I really dislike the purple lines does, Ancestry think that it’s subscribers are stupid and that they cannot figure out what belongs where. The colors of the pages are awful, bring back the clear white again. Ancestry obviously did not listen to what its subscribers were saying. It makes me think that I will start looking for a new home for my trees, especially since the recent demise of Family Tree Maker. Legacy is looking better and better to me.

I received a tree hint yesterday (from an Ancestry hint) so I took a look at the tree and the owner’s profile. I like to see if a person is active or not. The lady had posted a picture of herself in her own profile. She was headless! The picture was round and cropping had done the evil deed. I didn’t have the heart to contact her at the time, but maybe I should have. Now I can’t remember who she was.

Elhura: You are not the only one who has mouse problems while working in the Fact column. I have a hard time finding a neutral spot to rest my cursor while I think. Purple everywhere! I’m not happy about that.

I stopped using FTM 8 years ago but had not put any of my research online. When FTM started coming out with new versions every year I had a feeling that all the FTM users were being led down the primrose path by Ancestry.

Yesterday:
“In the beginning there was a plan.
“And the plan was based on assumptions.
“And the assumptions were without form.
“And the plan was completely without substance and was void.
“And when the plan was announced, darkness fell upon the faces of the customers.
“And the customers spoke unto the customer service staff, saying: ‘It is a crock of sh** and it stinketh.’
“And the customer service staff went unto their managers, and sayeth: ‘It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odour thereof.’
“And the managers went unto their regional managers, and sayeth unto them: ‘It is a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that none here may abide it.’
“And the regional managers went unto their general managers, and sayeth unto them: ‘It is a vessel of fertiliser and none can abide its strength.’
“And the general managers went unto the chief general manager, and sayeth unto him: ‘It contains that which promotes plant growth and it is very strong.’
“And the chief general manager went unto the managing director, and sayeth unto him: ‘It promoteth growth and is very powerful.’
“And the managing director went unto the board, and sayeth unto them: ‘The customers have said that this powerful new plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of the company.
“And the board looked at the plan and saw that it was good.
“And the plan became policy.”

Today:
“In the beginning there was announced another plan that the customers saw was without form or substance. The customers told the company that the plan was a crock of sh**.
“And there was silence, and more silence.
“And finally the managing director told the board: ‘The customers have said that this powerful new plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of the company.
“And the board rubberstamped the plan and the plan became policy.”

Tomorrow:
“In the beginning there was silence.
“And there was more silence.
“And there was so much silence that the managing director woke up.
“And the managing director looked about him and cried out: ‘Where has everybody gone?’”

And now you force us to view life story over genealogical facts in the mobile version? Ancestry is to real genealogical research as “reality tv” is to real life. Saying something false is real will never make it true. Liars, the lot of you!

I will say it again, people. Those of you who are threatening to leave ancestry when your subscription expires, DO NOT WAIT! Leave now and demand a refund! Only hitting them where it really hurts – their funding source – will make them see the light. I have already cancelled my subscription; who of you will join me?

There currently is no way to sort the shoebox. We need a way to sort the SHOEBOX by NAME. The shoebox is an excellent way to “save” records of possible interest for later. But unless you deal with the saved record soon, you can’t find it again. It saves sorted only by the date it was saved, which is the problem. I can’t take the time to go through hundreds of pages (at only 10 per page) to find what I may have saved some time ago.

If I search and find a record for a second time, the system lets me know I have saved that record in my shoebox. That’s good. But I want a way to SORT the shoebox by NAME. That’s all. Don’t go getting creative and try sorting by any other thing. I’ve been asking for years for this!

@ Carrie. I agree we need a way to sort the Shoebox by NAME – perhaps an option to do so could be added. My Shoebox is full, too, of now lost leads.

In my opinion, Shoebox still needs to retain its default listing by “Most Recent” since frequently a record needs storing just for a short time while moving through other data. Sometimes, I also use the most recent in my Shoebox to remind me of a forgotten someone who needs continued work. Having to always search by Name in both instances would hinder this. On the otherhand, how many times have I wished for your idea of the name search option!

Unless it has just been corrected, the saving to Shoebox feature has been a bit curtailed in New Ancestry. A record will NOT save to the Shoebox from Hints. Those go into YES-NO-MAYBE. It also will not save to the Shoebox from records found via SEARCH. The only way I have recently been able to save into Shoebox are from those records already in my tree for another family member. This makes Shoebox much less effective! The SAVE TO SHOEBOX feature should be there from all three venues.

To the Ivory Tower Intellectuals at Ancestry who are responsible for this unmitigated disaster. ” You would all have made excellent Kamikazi pilots! Tears are running down my face as I write this. My mother was raised in an orphanage and she was a living loving human being and not just some foot note in history! I spent hundreds of hours researching our family history and I assumed all of my notes and photos were in safe storage on your site. I have been away from continuing on this journey for the past two years and only now have been able to pick up where I left off. I was shocked to my core and sickened when I logged on today. WHERE ARE All MY NOTES? I sent you more information and images then I ever received from you! I liked the old program for it’s organization and simplicity. My family and I are very disappointed. Just who do you people think you are? I think I know my family better than you. And I don’t need a history lesson to tell my families story. You tried to reinvent something that was already an excellent program and failed miserably. Here is a lesson for you. Microsoft tried to do something similar and they called it Windows 8 but now are offering folks free upgrades to Windows 10! It’s not to late. I implore you to do what’s right and bring back the old Ancestry as expeditiously as possible!

Elhura: Very interesting response for a couple of reasons. Yes, you are right. Having the Shoebox records saved by date is good. I should have stated in my last post “in addition to date saved.” I assumed that would remain the same. I should never assume anything with Ancestry! I should have learned that after all these years.

You mentioned you can’t save from the YES, NO, MAYBE to the shoebox. It so happened I was just in a 1910 US census and I got the yes, no, maybe, and I wanted none of them, so I just backed out of the record. Then I thought the “maybe” might make it go to the shoebox so I tried that. It went to” undecided,” but that only shows when reviewing hints. I didn’t like that. I went back and saved the record. The very next hint was the yes, no, maybe, again, and again I backed out of the record. Sheesh! What a pain! Very inefficient.

Just because I don’t want to make up my mind on the spot, I shouldn’t have to make a decision right then and there. It’s too easy to get side-tracked and lose my focus.

Regarding saving records from a search; I guess I haven’t noticed, maybe because I haven’t tried. I have been on Ancestry since they dumped the new version on us, actually using it to do research. (I haven’t done anything else except eat and sleep.) I had tested it several times and thought I knew how it worked, but I notice they are still changing it. Something is different every day. I don’t always mentioned it. I thought it might be my computer or my operating system or my browser..or me! No, it is changing!

I will copy your post and test it for each thing on my system. You bring up some very good points. I’ll be back!

@To all members on this blog – Rest assured ACOM does read your messages. They read them and they delete those that tells the truth too close to comfort. @Pa has it right. Messages appear and disappear. E.g., they deleted my response to Dora Jar, at which point the comments that Elhura and gp made in reference to my message does not make sense to the reader. @ACOM since you deleted my original message/response to Dora Jar of December 18, 2:30 a.m. my time, please delete also my second message of December 18, written a few minutes later to correct one of my sentences in the prior message. Keeping that follow-up message of mine after removing the original message does not make sense. ACOM I am tired of being lectured by people who do not have 10% of my life experience, that it will be okay and that I will get used to change and that, if LifeStories makes mistakes it has to be because I have flaws in my trees. How dare you be so condescending. All I did is give Dora Jar the grandmotherly advice to work on her self-righteousness. Our goal should always be to be righteous, not self-righteous!

The message that I am referring to, which was deleted, is the one where I point out that ACOMs insistence on being “geologically correct” (I have to assume ACOM means geographically correct) and claiming in their LifeStories that my relatives, whose birth records show that they were born German citizens in German territory, were actually born in the Czech Republic. I pointed out that this is as historically and politically incorrect as to state that a Palestinian who was born around 1940 in a village that later on in 1945 became part of the State of Israel, to claim that said Palestinian was born in Israel. He was born in “what is now” Israel, but he was not born in Israel. Deal with it! That is the reality of life.

As a member of the DAR I was thrilled this morning to learn that I have an additional Revolutionary Patriot. My 3x great grandfather who arrived in America in 1832. Wait- what? I have spent 10 minutes trying to delete this error that “new” Ancestry PLACED on his profile. Know history much?

I don’t care to be frog-marched into something I don’t want or like. I started my research in the library, then sending away for paper docs via snail mail. Later I went to the internet for sites pertaining to records from certain states. I finally got around to Ancestry.coN for the census images–that was its’ most useful feature. Old Search was very helpful. Did anyone who worked on the New Ancestry have any experience with genealogical research or were they just techies sitting on their hands wanting something to tinker with? First they ruined Genealogy.com now I wonder how long it will be before Ancestry becomes “read only”.

@ Paul – I’ve now found that my 4x great grandfather was born no in England but in Jamaica!
@Peter McGregor – thank you for making us laugh 🙂
@Kevin Gaughan – I totally agree with you
@Jeanette – I think you’ve missed the point here – we’re talking about years of hard work and carefully crafted family histories. Everyone is different – some people just like to collect names, others haven’t been researching their family history for very long and are relatively new, but for those who have poured heart and soul into their family history (not to mention many years and a lot of money), it’s heart breaking to have it all messed up and destroyed. I chose Ancestry because was it was beautifully simple and easy to use, it displayed family history in a clear, attractive way. It’s not a case of ‘getting used’ to something new – it’s a case of having lost what we once a had. To me, my family trees looks soulless. If I wanted something that looked so clinical, then I’d have looked elsewhere. Those of us who have extensive family trees just don’t have the time to go through thousands of profiles correcting all the mistakes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against new ideas – it’s good to look at your research from a different viewpoint, but it doesn’t help that the changes are so radical. Why not keep what’s good from old Ancestry and add one or two new ideas at a time? That gives everyone time to ‘get used’ to them before they’re permanently adopted (if successful).

@ Carrie. Thanks for your reply. I appreciate it. Sounds as if our thoughts about Shoebox are the same.

I have looked again and, as of this moment, saving to Shoebox works from records already in my tree AND from SEARCH. I promise those I viewed yesterday did NOT work from SEARCH. Glad it works today.

The YES-NO-MAYBE from HINTS still does as you said – MAYBE takes you only to UNDECIDED. It should take you automatically to Shoebox as well.

Perhaps the YES-NO-MAYBE were poor nomenclature for what was well-named without changing. Often I am reminded that the various parts of new Ancestry were apparently designed by different members of the design team who appear not to have communicated well with each other. If they had, names and functions would be consistent within the work scheme and redundant things like GENDER -NAME EDIT would not be needed had they retained ALL the features of QUICK EDIT.

The arbitrary imposition of this new retrograde format on its paying customers is to be deplored. It is obvious that this format is designed for use on the i-phone, i-pad, tablet etc. The garish and highly contrasting colour scheme is designed to show up on small screens, The media on the personal media gallery has been moved off the profile to another page and the format changed so items (Photos etc) can easily be scrolled on tiny touch pad screens. Search results now only appear 2 at a time, again so they are big enough to read on an i-pad and of course you may have noted the larger size of the lettering, again for the obvious reason of suiting the i-pad/i-phone. In my opinion this retrograde edition of ancestry has much diminished its functionality and its ability to be enjoyed.
Traditionally the customer base of ‘Ancestry’ increases around Christmas time and cashing in on the Christmas sales of i-phones, I-pads etc with a format to suit them would seem to be what its all about (note the introduction date of the new format 12th Dec).
One could be forgiven for thinking that Ancestry Is in total disregard of a large section of its customer base i.e. Those of us who are serious about genealogy and use larger devices that are eminently suitable for the same.
The very least Ancestry can do is offer us the choice between this “new” unsuitable format or the Classic view
I am now considering the alternatives with the intention of cancelling my subscription to the said company after 8 years.
Evolution not revolution.
All programmes, website etc should (if necessary) evolve to improve fuctionality. Revolution is always a mess usually ending in tears. Why the hell should I have to adjust or learn new skills. I am not an employee of Ancestry nor a college student, I am a paying customer.
Ancestry shoud have spent the money improving their search engine so we do not have to wade through a load of irrelevant info. The useless Hints function could also be dumped.

Adding a record to an individual from Hints now throws me back to tree page rather than simply back to the hints for the individual. I now have to reopen the individual’s profile page from tree page, go back into hints and repeat the process. Every record attachment takes at least three more clicks in New versus Classic. Please do a side by side comparison of Classic and New for basic tasks (Add a person, attach a record, search) and at least get those functions in New to require as few clicks as Classic.

It’s totally amazing to me that you ask for feedback AFTER the fact that it has been changed, and then ignore every single bit of it. It’s apparent that this ‘new and improved’ Ancestry is one of the worst changes ever made – and there have been some dillies in the past. I don’t think I’ve ever been as disappointed or even disgusted as I am now trying to research my family and help others do so. Please get rid of this dysfunctional program, or at least give us the option of using the old version. Who gives a hoot how old little Johnny was when his siblings were born or when his parents died – actually most of us can do the math for ourselves without having to wade through all that junk. Jack Webb has some good advice for you, “Just the facts ma’am, just the facts!” PLEASE!

Don`t you just love the timing of the change from `Old` to `New`. You can almost hear them deciding on a date when we`re all taken up with Christmas !!!! A similar thing happens when politicians want to rush through something which they know will be unpopular. they do it when there`s a national event e.g. Royal Weddings & Royal babies etc. On the subject of Kendall Hulet.WHO IS HE ? WHAT IS HE? What age is he……12?? Either that or he doesn`t know very much about life !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have been reading the comments posted and will only add “This new update is trash”. I have been a ftm user for close to 20 years, but now the hunt is on for a new family tree program where the owners, developers, etc. respect their customer base.

I am fairly new at genealogy as only started 3 years ago so after looking at my limited number of people on my tree I seem to have come out of this debacle fairly unscathed as far as erroneous info cropping up where it shouldn’t. However I agree with all the foregoing comments about how awful the site now is and like many am considering cancelling my subscription. The question is, for a newbie what other options are there for a UK based enthusiast to use other than Ancestry, which I was told was the best! I did try Genes ReUnited but don’t like many aspects of their site either. Any suggestions would be appreciated and on top of that competitive companies being mentioned on here should get right up Ancestry’s nasal cavities.

Take the New Ancestry survey:https://ancestry.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_02mXKrYAQtgUG4B?Q_CHL=si
This appeared on the blog on December 21, 2015 at 11:07 am. It doesn’t ask for your years of Ancestry use or your level of proficiency, so include that in the comment section. This survey should be improved to include these IMPORTANT factors, then emailed to ALL the members. And the results of participating members disclosed.

About the New Ancestry feedback survey. . .it would be best to NOT mark the “0” (zero) category on this survey…it has been noted that Ancestry may not count the the zeroes. I’d put a “1”( one) instead of a “0”. Just a thought.

Ancestry, I have been a member for over 15 years. Please give us an option to return to the last format.
You can ditch the Storyline. It is a waste of space.
The premise of making our family tree and the option to design it to our liking. Ancestry has taken it upon them selves to add birth and death of family members. The Marriage had in bold letters who they married. Now it is noted in small letters marriage, which blends with other info.
When you post Census for the head of household, one is unable to use that page to read others on that page or add them at ease, now you have to go out and search the others one by one. Heaven help you if the name is a nickname or other. Or birth is off by a couple years. It is very difficult to find them!

This is a nightmare!

Ancestry has taken the joy of finding our loved ones and giving them a place in history. A way to be remembered.
There are so many errors, others have addressed.
Again give us the option to return to last format of Ancestry.

Court reports state in early summer 2014, Taggart, the co-founder of Ancestry.com, provided alcohol to a friend of his daughter as they played a game during a sleepover. Reports state Taggart’s daughter fell asleep, and he made sexual advances on her friend.

The female victim stayed at Taggart’s home again, and Taggart again provided her with alcohol before sexually abusing her, police reports state.

Another female victim stayed at Taggart’s home in September 2014 when similar circumstances took place, police reports state. Between Oct. 31, 2014 and March 1, 2015, Taggart sent sexually inappropriate text messages to the second victim, police reports state.

On Dec. 16, Taggart and his attorney, Dean Zabriskie, informed Judge Claudia Laycock in Fourth District Court that Taggart saw one of the victims working in a retail store. Laycock asked Taggart if he knew the victim worked at the store, and he shook his head no.

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But prosecuting attorney Ryan McBride said the problem wasn’t that he saw the victim, but that he didn’t leave after he knew she was there.

McBride said since the contact, the victim has been cutting herself and is afraid of seeing Taggart again. McBride said he had a written corroborating statement from the victim.

On Tuesday, Laycock ruled in favor of McBride’s request and Taggart was placed under custody. Taggart has been out of custody practically since his arrest after posting bail.

Having had most of my other comments deleted by Ancestry, and failed to get others posted due to being considered to be spam (!) I just wanted to ask if anyone had heard anything on how Ancestry’s Management are reacting to all the negativity around their 2 disastrous decisions?

The New Ancestry survey. . .the question was put to Ancestry directly on Facebook 20 hours ago. . .so far Ancestry’s minions have declined to answer!!!! It seems pretty clear that Ancestry is tossing out all zeroes.

I gave the new ancestry format a try when it first became available, but switched back (while I still could) to the old format. Even after using it extensively to adjust to the changes, I find the new version quite user “unfriendly”. It seems like the majority of comments do not view the new format favorably. We are paying subscribers. Isn’t anyone at ancestry.com listening? I have enjoyed the site so much in the past, but am rethinking the renewal of my subscription when it expires in February.

I’ve not really explored the new ancestry, but have found the font very hard to read when scaling it larger for my senior eyes. While working in the DNA pages, my browser used up all the memory on my PC and I had to close out of it three times in about three hours. I’ve stopped my annual subscription and have gone to monthly until I decide on my future relationship with ancestry. I do hope that you revert back to what works.

Very unsatisfied with the buggy new ancestry. Tonight for instance several times I clicked on a link to another person’s tree to get a blank window. Pure dysfunction. Please reinstate the OLD ancestry!

I have just read all the above negative comments and I agree with every one of them. I can see that you are going to be losing not just hundreds but hopefully thousands of customers over this new format you have come up with out of someones nightmare. The company must have stock in paper and ink because it will take a lot of it if you want to print anything out.

I had the problem of clicking on family trees and getting a blank screen for several days. Today I find I keep having to click several times to get anything to save. I wish Ancestry would tell us what is going on!

I just tried to add a marriage and found out that I can’t add the spouse and date in the same window. First I had to add the spouse’s name, then I had to open another window and add the marriage date. The new ancestry is so much more awkward to use than old ancestry. New ancestry takes more time to do anything than old ancestry. I hate the new format.

Please don’t get on my case, but if you are not using at least Windows 7 and you want to upload a GEDCOM file from a computer that has XP, I don’t think it will work. Ancestry did tell us they don’t support XP but I thought I’d give it a try. The new Ancestry will not let you browse to find your GEDCOM file on your hard disk.

I give this info to you because I know there are folks who do use XP. It does work within Ancestry. Many people have posted they want to quit Ancestry and take their tree(s) with them unless Ancestry restores the classic version, or they get their stuff together.

If you do take you tree(s) off and later you want to come back, you may have to upgrade your home computer if you haven’t done that in the meantime.

You can make the GEDCOM file to use on another program and delete it on Ancestry. That will work, but if you use XP, you can’t come back using XP.

You can leave your tree on Ancestry and they will make use of it, as they do now, even if is private. They do send out hints to others who have approximately the same person, even from private trees. They also send out hints as to the records that have been saved in private trees. They just don’t name the private tree.

I would bet my life Ancestry will never bring back the classic. There is always a chance they will get their stuff together and make this a decent program that will be acceptable to all.

So be sure of what you decide to do. When Ancestry dumps something, it stays dumped!

Something else I’ve noticed, which I suspect is a reaction to New Ancestry since so many people are going private, almost all of my new DNA matches either have no tree attached, have a private tree or have only 6 people in their tree (which can’t be seen because they’re still living). This is in STARK CONTRAST to the mostly public matches I had for the first 2 yrs. after getting my DNA test. Over the last year they have more and more become private.

The article that appears immediately below, originally appeared in Legacy News (30 August 2007 issue). Immediately following is a response from Ancestry.com that appeared in Ancestry’s 24-7 Family History Circle blog (31 August 2007)

Ancestry.com – “You’re Not Going to Believe This”

Ancestry.com – Love ’em or hate ’em?

After what Ancestry.com tried to pull this week, you probably don’t “love ’em.” But then, just yesterday, I located a document for an ancestor on their site after which I thought to myself, “I sure am glad I have an Ancestry subscription – I probably wouldn’t have found that anywhere else.”

Ancestry does provide a wonderful service. Although a bit pricey for many, I’m sure they put millions and millions of dollars into their efforts. We should not expect something for nothing.

This week, however, Ancestry went too far. The genealogy community, represented by a variety of bloggers, fought back. Ancestry “listened” and removed (for now) their new Internet Biographical Collection database.

Basically, Ancestry cached the pages from other’s websites and called the pages their own by requiring a subscription to access them. Imagine Becky Wiseman’s surprise when she received an email from someone asking for more information they found on Becky’s website at Ancestry.com. Becky does not have a website at Ancestry.com, and she knew that what they were talking about was not her free pages at Rootsweb. Becky researched the issue and learned that Ancestry had copied her personal website and made it available, for a fee, at Ancestry.

This didn’t happen to just a few websites.

Ancestry started listening, and soon made their new Internet Biographical Collection database free, after giving them a valid email address.

Yesterday Ancestry issued a statement suggesting that they were trying to help the genealogy community by archiving websites. They have now pulled the database.

I’m now more motivated to increase my efforts with the FamilySearchIndexing project.

The following statement was issued today by Kendall Hulet, a product manager at Ancestry.com, in response to the controversial Internet Biographical Collection Ancestry published this week:
Hi, my name is Kendall Hulet, and I’m a product manager at Ancestry.com. I’ve probably met a lot of you at FGS, NGS, and other conferences. If not, I look forward to meeting you in the future.

I wanted to write you a note because I’m extremely concerned about the frustrations that the recently-removed Internet Biographical Collection has caused. We had hoped to provide a way for you to be able to search the entire web easily for genealogically-relevant pages and provide for preservation of sources for future generations. In looking back, we understand why members of the community are upset.

We’ve heard you loud and clear, and we’ve removed this product with no intention of re-releasing it. Instead, it is my hope that someday we’ll be able to provide a free web search engine that links directly back to the live web pages, and can become a useful tool to the genealogical community. If we do move forward with this type of initiative, we will seek your input and talk more with community leaders to make sure we get it right.

ALL MEMBERS NOW MOVING AWAY FROM THE NEW ANCESTRY.
It now has been one week since the change to permanent “new Ancestry”. I let it be known that if things weren’t changed back within one week I would be actively searching out and procuring new software and doing my genealogy in an entirely different way than I am now. I am now actively doing that, as it is very apparent to me this website is going to go bye bye soon. What a great way of “giving” a Christmas present to your loyal customers.
And just as an aside, my comments here are starting to be deleted so this may be the last one that makes it through. Mike

As I am winding down with Ancestry, I keep trying to find one thing to keep me with Ancestry. Each visit makes me sadder and more angry. At one time I was proud of my tree – clean, crisp one page profile with text and visuals on ONE PAGE. If I chose to create a story, it was MY CHOICE and I could select visual on profile to put on story. Now Ancestry has taken over and added a story to all profiles. And to remove a story, I went to Help: 1) From the Stories section, locate story you wish to delete. I could not get past step 1) ….. I was willing to remove the story from all of my profiles. Why that drastic measure? The story page is beyond description of bad – I found on story I worked on this morning …ready for this …PHOTO OF FORMER HUSBAND WITH NEW WIFE. i BLOCKED. Ancestry, others keep blaming complaining tree members as problem which is usual tactic of folks, companies who ERR to blame someone else for the mess. Ancestry would prove the great company it once was by admitting a colossal stumble with New Ancestry, scrap, restore much of what was good about Old Ancestry, FTM and other info. sources it provided. At 76 I have known changes, and have tried to adapt. Working in a library 1970’s – catalog drawers with cards which disappeared as the Library of Virginia went digital. I taught myself how to use a personal computer and it is a daily learning experience. So, others being blamed for Ancestry’s stumble and Ancestry’s bad grace not to admit their error baffles me. Ancestry was a go-to-place for good brain exercise & enjoyment. It now is just a place of frustration and has certainly been the “lump of coal” in Santa’s bag.

I actually got an email back from Ancestry support yesterday. It was full of the usual rubbish – they know change is hard but you’ll get used to it and here’s a lesson on how it works. I worked in IT for many years, I don’t need a lesson thanks. But I did notice one comment they made which may have just been their phrasing “At this time the old Ancestry has been retired”. At this time – Could this be the smallest glimmer of a rethink? I doubt it but I live in hope!

Please, Ancestry, find a way to eliminate the Facts page coming “alive” with the movement of the cursor across the page. The pop-up fact outline and the coming alive of Edit are just almost as visually and mentally distracting as the horrible purple octupus lines and purple background highlight demeaning the page. Please give us a work page WITHOUT these features.

Yesterday I had to use the site to do research about kin from over 100 years ago that I had just obtained pictures for. Every moment I used it my skin crawled with disgust. The old site had dignity and a sense of professionalism to it. Using it one felt they were creating art dedicated to their ancestors. Using and looking at the new site made me feel juvenile despite being retired. The new site is mechanical, like a worksheet, and offers no sense that you are building a memorial to the your ancestors when you work on their profile. You are just entering data. Oh how I hate ‘new Ancestry’. I can’t say it any more plainly.

“Every moment I used it my skin crawled with disgust.” I can’t stand the “new” ancestry.

I don’t even want to use it any more and no, I don’t plan on “getting used to it”.

I met with a History professor yesterday who is doing a really interesting local history research project with her students and I was about to show her my ancestry site but decided against it because it’s now all about flash and colour instead of the data. Life Story is an embarrassment to anyone conducting serious research.

I would suggest to the management that you start listening to your customers and put an immediate end to this debacle:

I think all of the 10-year-old children and high school-age nieces and nephews who get a Christmas gift subscription to Ancestry.com will enjoy Kendall’s new program. After all, it’s very pretty, pretty. Pretty colors. Pretty bells and whistles. And … pretty dumbed down for a quick-and-easy classroom family-history project, and pretty dumbed down for the mobile smartphone- and tablet-using millennials for whom new format was designed. But, afterwards, it’ll probably end up in the digital equivalent of the back-of-the-closet with all the other useless and out-grown Christmas presents once they realize that family history research is hard, and it takes lots and lots of time. If it wasn’t and if it didn’t, we’d all be doing it.

On another quick note, Ancestry seems very proud of its “70 million family trees containing six billion ancestors.” Hey, Ancestry: You didn’t create those trees. Where do you think all that data came from? How many cemeteries have you walked through? How many miles of microfilm have you read? How many county courthouse have you been in, spending how many afternoons copying information from yellow-faded ledgers? How many relatives have you interviewed?
Quite frankly, if it wasn’t for our research, Ancestry would have no reason to exist. You are just caretakers of OUR data, a job for which we pay you well and are happy to do so. Yes, we are happy to do so; you provide a valuable asset. I just wish you would stop acting like you were born on third base and going through your business careers thinking you hit triples because Ancestry is so successful. It is the thousands of subscribers who built and shared their databases from whom you are making your money. Our thanks? Getting ignored in our demand that we be given the option of working with Classic, again. Let us do what we do best … then you can go on with your business model (mining our data) and making all the money you want. Like you, I want to see Ancestry succeed, grow. But at the cost of being ignored; cast away … no! Like so, many, I too will be unsubscribing to your service in the spring when my subscription expires.

In a growing tech company, what are the most valuable things on which a product manager should spend time?

This is not a complete list, but in a growing technology company your time as a PM should be spent mostly:

1. Interacting with customers and your users: understand their problems and what you need to do to solve them. Answer their questions, help them when they encounter issues and generally just be there for them. This can happen in person, on the phone, over email and in support forums.

2. Developing a vision for the product with your team: based on #1, what problem do you aim to solve and what do you need to build to solve it? What is the perfect product that would solve our user’s problems, and what are the steps we need to take to get there?

3. Working with engineering to make the product better: vast majority of your time should be spent with the people who are building the product, clearing their roadblocks and eliminating any distractions. This also includes tactical stuff like prioritizing features, making decisions and managing schedules.

Received a Dear John email from Ancestry myself 🙁 They are genuinely sorry to hear that I am unsatisfied with the new site… and regret any negativity I have felt (odd way to state this). They regret that their update might cause me to leave, but they sure didn’t do or say anything to incite me to stay either. My feedback is being forwarded to the “proper department”. They wished me continued you success… and that was it. After something like 10 years and how much $$$ that is the best they can do?!?!?! Come on Ancestry, help us out here. We loved what we had before, why can’t we just have it back? I am also trying to get access to their beta site, I was VERY constructive the entire time they were building their new site with comments on why I refused to used the new site… but I can see that none of those comments were even taken into consideration. The coloring of the site is one of the biggest turn offs of all, and having inaccurate information being pushed to our sites is embarrassing.

For Christmas I am still hoping for the return of a brighter/cleaner/more user friendly site… with correct information. Please Ancestry hear my plea.

Well folks, here’s a faint ray of light from the end of the Ancestry tunnel that might not be an oncoming train:

On December 19, I sent the text of my December 17 post on this blog regarding an “Off” option for all LIFESTORY views directly to support@ancestry.com, and yesterday I got the following reply from Kirn, Customer Solutions Associate at Ancestry:

“… Thank you for contacting Ancestry in regard to changing how others can view your trees. We are always happy to take suggestions and help resolve your questions in anyway we can. One thing you can do is change your tree to a ‘private tree’ so that nobody can see your tree unless you specifically invite them like you mentioned. …
“I will also pass on the feedback to our developers for you about the idea of making the Lifestory optional. …”

I was pretty surprised that the Ancestry representative actually referred to making my trees private, which I had already done in July. The promise to pass along my feedback to developers may be a standard response, but at least someone is reading user suggestions.

This is the response I got…
Thank you for contacting Ancestry in regard to the New Ancestry.

Thank you for contacting Ancestry in regard to New Ancestry vs Old Ancestry. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused. Unfortunately, we cannot bring Old Ancestry back. Over a year ago, based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs, we set out to build a better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story. On December 15, we completed the final transition worldwide to the new Ancestry site. We realize that change is never easy, and that it takes time to adjust to a new experience. Thank you for your patience. We appreciate your support, feedback, and passion for Ancestry. All Members Now Moving to the New Ancestry – https://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2015/12/14/all-members-now-moving-to-the-new-ancestry/ If you would like to submit additional feedback, please review the following Help article. It offers more options for submitting feedback: http://ancestry.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/970/

Thank you for contacting Ancestry in regard to New Ancestry vs Old Ancestry. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused. Unfortunately, we cannot bring Old Ancestry back. Over a year ago, based on extensive research into our members’ wants and needs, we set out to build a better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story. On December 15, we completed the final transition worldwide to the new Ancestry site. We realize that change is never easy, and that it takes time to adjust to a new experience. Thank you for your patience. We appreciate your support, feedback, and passion for Ancestry. All Members Now Moving to the New Ancestry

APPARENTLY NOT THERE HEY, ALL THE LIGHTS ARE ON, BUT THERE’S NO ONE IN!

WELL, WE DID SAY WE WOULD FIGHT YOU ABOUT TAKING AWAY OUR CLASSIC ANCESTRY, DIDN’T WE!!! DID YOU REALLY THINK WE WOULD ALL TAKE IT ON THE CHIN, ACCEPT IT AND JUST KNUCKLE DOWN AND WORK ON YOUR RIDICULOUS NEW FORMAT!! THINK AGAIN ANCESTRY.
YOU HAVE MADE A MOCKERY OF OUR TREES, INSULTED OUR ANCESTORS WITH THE GARBAGE YOU HAVE PUT IN THEIR STORIES.
I TELL YOU NOW MY ANCESTOR WOULD HAVE NOT GIVEN A FLYING FIG ABOUT THE “ENTENDE CORDIALE”, SHE WOULD HAVE HAD MORE PRESSING THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT!
BUT WHAT HAS MADE ME PRETTY ANGRY IS YOU STATING THAT AN ANCESTOR PASSED AWAY IN 1915 IN WARWICKSHIRE, WHEN HE WAS IN FACT KILLED IN WW1 IN YPRES 1915
( THERE IS NOTHING IN MY TREE TO CAUSE YOU TO MAKE THIS TERRIBLE MISTAKE!!)

YOU ALSO SAID MY 4TH GREAT GRANDFATHER FOUGHT THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO IN “ONTARIO”
FOR GOODNESS SAKE, GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER NOW, SORT YOURSELVES OUT.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION, THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO TOOK PLACE IN BELGIUM IN 1815. MY 4TH GREAT GRANDFATHER (A 3RD FOOT GUARD) LAY ON THE BATTLEFIELD ALL NIGHT VERY BADLY WOUNDED, HE HAD REMAINED UN- INJURED UNTIL AROUND 5PM, BUT THEN A SHOT HAD PASSED RIGHT THROUGH HIS BODY JUST UNDER HIS RIBS AND HAD BROUGHT HIM TO THE GROUND, WEAK FROM LOSS OF BLOOD, HE HAD TURNED HIMSELF OVER AND IN SO DOING RAISED HIS ARM, WHEN AT THAT MOMENT A CANNON SHOT STRUCK HIM JUST ABOVE THE WRIST, AND TOOK AWAY HIS HAND.
WHEN THE WOUNDED WERE COLLECTED THE NEXT MORNING HE WAS FOUND STILL ALIVE, HE SURVIVED WATERLOO. HE WAS JUST 20 YEARS OLD. AND I AM SO VERY PROUD OF HIM. HE DID NOT GIVE UP SO EASILY, DID HE ANCESTRY? BUT YOU DEMEANED MY ANCESTOR WITH WHAT YOU PUT IN HIS STORY!!
YOU SHOULD FEEL VERY ASHAMED AT ALL THE “FALSE INFO” YOU HAVE PUT ON OUR TREES.
I ALSO FIND YOUR ATTITUDE TO OUR FEEDBACK QUITE CONDESCENDING, ARE YOU SO BIG FOR YOUR BOOTS, THAT YOU CHOOSE TO IGNORE SUCH NEGATIVE FEEDBACK?

MAKE THINGS RIGHT FOR YOUR LOYAL CUSTOMERS NOW.
MAKE IT A HAPPY CHRISTMAS FOR YOUR VERY MANY “ONCE” LOYAL CUSTOMERS,
GIVE US BACK THE “RIGHTFUL FORMAT” THE FORMAT THAT WAS SO ENJOYABLE TO WORK ON. SO THAT WE “YOUR LOYAL CUSTOMERS” MAY CONTINUE TO ENJOY WORKING ON OUR TREES.

GIVE US BACK “OUR BELOVED CLASSIC OLD ANCESTRY” NOW.

WE JUST CANNOT CONTINUE TO WORK WITH SOMETHING WE ABSOLUTELY LOATHE WITH A PASSION!!

With regard to the post Robyn left about the response she received – we pay our fees to build the tree the way WE want to; we pay our fees to tell the “story” (what a crass word to use!!) the way WE want to.

Are you listening Ancestry?? We do NOT pay our fees to have you build OUR trees, tell OUR “story” the way that YOU want to!!

In that response, Ancestry declared”we set out to build a better website that reinvents the way Ancestry helps you discover and tell your family story”

Well, you just invented a complete shambles; a “square wheel” for want of one way of putting it.

I am mystified as to who designed and thought this format would be helpful. I have been using ancestry for over 10 years, made books, touted it to friends, helped them learn how to find things, helped them start trees, even do research for them. No more, I cannot in good conscience recommend ancestry to anyone. The only thing that makes sense is that you are encouraging people to hire professional genealogists. In the meantime, although this has been one of my favorite night time, rainy day past times, when my subscription expires I will not renew. Here are some of the reasons why.
First – The contrast is terrible. Maybe it works under florescent lights but in home lighting it is less than helpful. The gray/blue is not crisp and is too monochromatic. Eyes get tired faster.
2. You have made “Sources” more important than family members. I really enjoyed opening up a profile and seeing the picture associated with the wedding, the siblings pictures, which when there were 10 kids make me work harder to find the gaps. Now, they are so miniscule that it would not matter if they are missing you cannot see them. Which also contributes to the monochromatic profile mentioned in #1.
3. Many “public” trees I have utilized as a framework for help, have now been made private thanks to the new system.
5. I am tired of every time I search for records having an AD to purchase a subscription at the top, taking up valuable results space, especially since I already have a subscription.
6. I miss the MAP of the world where you could click on a country or a US State to stratify a search. It may be there someplace but have not found it yet.
I could go on but would be reiterating the comments of those that have come berfore me. Thank goodness I have finished my husbands side, and have almost finished mine. Once I publish on mycanvas (with the new company) I will be done.
Did any of these “designers” even do genealogy? It almost seems like it is being designed for people who do not know what they are doing and will not know the difference.
And why do it just before Christmas? Especially with winter coming when people have more time indoors to work on their projects, a spring introduction may have been a little less painful (but only a little less).

Where is the family view. Another change for change sake asked for by us users. Really. Its the programmers and where is the money. Thank GOD I have my tree completed. Still roots web just showing my facts, not speculative storied about a family that the computers never laughed with, hugged, and never ever will know. Yes you can put together a tree for people to smile about, but without me and the thousands of real researchers